Letting go.

I have bunches of people in my life right now who are struggling with letting go.

I was thinking about this and it made me think, naturally, of people I have let go but before we get to that let's consider this.

It made me think of the people who wouldn't let me go. Have you ever had someone who held on to you too tightly or too long? Whatever the reason. Maybe they thought you couldn't make it on your own. They were afraid for you, or afraid for themselves without you. Maybe they thought you would be so broken and sad without them that the kindest thing for them to do would be to hold on.

All you wanted was for them to let go. Maybe not to disappear entirely. Probably not that, though, really, there are most likely examples of that out there as well. But you wished they would loosen that grip some.

Pull those talons out of my back would you dear?

Because even if they're holding you there out of love, even if you love them back, it's just suffocating.

It's too much to shove onto anyone. It's inflicting yourself and your own stuff on them and then telling yourself that you're doing it out of a good place.

People I couldn't let go of. Long list. I'm better now.

Here's you coat, hit the road.

Don't be a stranger but don't be the furniture.

I let go of Splinky once, a long time ago and it was a damn good thing, because if I hadn't I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be close friends now.

I couldn't let go of TL.

When TL died I held him so hard my arms ached. Metaphorically. Physically I never even saw the body. Tough to deal with, that. Maybe that was WHY I held him so hard. Maybe it was because it was so sudden and maybe it was just because I had no intention of being without him. Partially it was because he was exceptional at sticking around.

I talked to TL every minute of every day after he died. I felt him near me and got more signs than a neon shop. I heard his voice, everyone around me did. He gave us physical clues and emotional clues every day. He was there. His mom and I were in so much pain- we needed that. We needed some sort of feeling from him because we were absolutely lost.

But I clung to that. I kept grasping at it, demanding more and more of it and I forgot that I was still in the physical world and that he had work to do elsewhere. I wanted him to breathe through me. I wanted him to live in my body since his had been taken.

After months of this, MONTHS of it, we had a fight. He screamed at me, he yelled at me, just in my head now, not out where others could hear it. One of the most frightening times of my life. He had an arsenal of terrifying images at his disposal, picked right from my own brain and he used each of them. Hurled them at me as weapons. I cried. I begged him to stop. When he finally did the message was quiet but clear.

Let me go.

He had work to do and I was in the way. He couldn't be here living with me but my grief was holding him.

I had resisted it for so long. I had seen my life never changing from the way he would recognize it. From the path it would have taken had he stayed with me. But he begged and I listened. I moved on. I had been so afraid that to do that, to move away from the constant grief, the constant reminding myself of him. He would be forgotten, not just by me but by the world. He had to be felt by the world.

He's with me every day. I don't ask him to live through me anymore. I just know that when something extraordinary happens he sees it, and that if I need him, his opinion or just his essence, he is here and I can get quiet and feel it, know it.

Letting go freed him to do what he needed to do, and to be with me in a way that was so much better, so much more fulfilling than I had dreamed possible. And it freed me to live the rest of my life, really live it and not just move through it.

Letting go is a gift. It's a hard won gift, scary on all sides but the most amazing and wonderful thing you can do for someone.

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