The Clouds That Keep Shifting

Over the years, I’ve had to learn to let go of a lot of things and people. One of the aspects of letting go that people don’t often mention or talk about is the fact that letting go doesn’t just mean letting go of external things. If you’re letting go of a friend, or a loved one, you are not merely letting go of them, it is much more difficult than that. What you are actually letting go of is small bits of yourself. You’re letting go of time, of shared spaces, of moments and histories. Every time you give yourself to another person, whether as a friend or something more, you give yourself to them. If they leave, they take those pieces of yourself with them. What you are left with now is a piece of yourself that they have. Sometimes that piece was important to you, crucial even. It can be difficult to navigate life without that one piece. This is what you have to learn to let go off.

The opposite is also true, they left a little piece of themselves with you. Now you have to learn to live without the whole and with only that little piece. Now, you have to figure out a way to protect and cherish it, for it is the only thing that reminds you of them. By being overly protective of it, you run the risk of neglecting the hole left by that little piece of yourself that you lost. And when neglected, the hole deepens and deepens, never finding real closure, always yearning for what was once there. No one tells you this, no one prepares you to deal with this kind of loss.

What you have to learn is how to detach yourself from yourself. You have to learn to cut off pieces of yourself: the memories, moments, dinner dates, date nights, songs – all of that changes once you finally let go. Songs have different meanings, poetry opens up a whole new world to you; one you could have never seen before. Stories reach a different part of you; one you never knew existed before. Everything that used to remind you of the good things, now reminds you of the end. You have to let go of feelings you once had and embrace new ones.

Letting go is kind of like repainting your walls. It is putting a façade, a new coat covering the damage on the wall. You could paint it in different colors, decorate using new artwork to hang on it – maybe something that no longer reminds you of what it used to look like before all the changes. It doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting what the wall looked like before but hopefully signifies a willingness to try a different thing and not cling to the old one.

If there are cracks in the wall, those will most likely stay. You cannot paint over cracks, much like you cannot easily be rid of the past. What you can do, however, is give yourself a new beginning and a hopeful outlook on the future, and maybe someone will come along who will help you mend the most stubborn of cracks. Perhaps you realize in some time that you can do it yourself. But for right now, simply beginning again is enough; and that can start with a new color palette.