Confessions of A Naughty Girl

The Letting Go

We spend an awful lot of time talking about knowing when you've found the right thing. The right job, the right friends, the right significant other.

Ironically enough, I've found that one of the hardest things about evolving is the letting go, (coincidentally one of the only songs Melissa Etheridge has written that doesn't give me the "this is totally about a chick" vibe).

I'm not sure why we - or I, for that matter - tend to hold on to things that just aren't working. Sometimes, I guess, it's love. Sometimes we love people so hard that the letting go is just not an option.

Sometimes we have such an insanely long history with someone that the letting go just doesn't seem possible, even after the scent on their borrowed-but-never-returned sweatshirt fades and their imprint on your sheets is washed over time and time again.

And yet sometimes, the person left, say, a watch at your house on your nightstand and the letting go cannot happen until the watch is disposed of in some way - either picked up by aforementioned watch owner, or simply pawned to the highest bidder, which is what will happen should former watch owner not make arrangements to pick up the watch.

At any rate, these are all very good reasons for holding off on the letting go. But sometimes, we have no reasons. We try something, see that it's not working, and hold on for dear life, as though we'll lose the clothing off our backs if we close the chapter.

Channeling Carrie Bradshaw here: What is it that makes us so afraid of the letting go? Is it fear of loneliness? Is it lack of a better option elsewhere? Is it the hope that if we hold on long enough the situation will simply morph into what we want it to be?

Don't get me wrong - I don't think love is all thunderbolts and multiple orgasms. I think there's a lot of good love out there that's dismissed too quickly because it lacks that "Fabio romance" quality. I think a good love is a balanced one - one that isn't so crazy it allows you to lose control over yourself, but rather helps you make sound decisions and makes you happy and grateful to have found someone that wants to walk through life with you. Call it boring, but in many ways, I think a good love is a comfort. Not a security blanket, mind you, but a comfort. So while it's admirable to give some at-first-unlikely prospects a chance, you can still only try so hard. At the end of the day, the potential is either there, or it's not. And if it's not, you should move on.

Nobody wants to feel lonely. But is it really worth sacrificing your energies for something that you know could be better? It's a fine balance, a thought process, a decision that, in each time I cross it, I'm not sure I'm very good at making. But every time I have (or do), my life has moved on. Other people have entered the picture. I haven't cried myself to sleep at night like I thought I would initially. As I've always said, the beauty of the human experience is that we're resilient. We're strong. We can afford to let go and not to settle because we will recover from the repercussions of that decision.

And so to close this argument, because I have no witty closing on this one, I lean to the lyrical musings of our favorite lesbian, Melissa Etheridge:

Piece by piece I take apart/This complicated heart/And I hope to find/Something I can prove is real/I can feel is truth/I can say is mine/That's all I ever wanted to be/The closer that I got/The further I could see/But when lovers change/And the night feels strange/We choose our road/The letting go

posted by KA @ 9:27 PM