Lately I’ve been pondering a lot about what it means to ‘let go’ of the past, and I think I might have concluded that the idea is bullshit. Of course, I get the point of trying to let it go: to not live in a state of dwelling on what we’ve lost, what is gone or to be consumed by regret for mistakes made or chances not taken. Obviously that’s not healthy and if you're doing that, you need to cut that shit out, like now. That type of obsessive thinking accomplishes nothing other than to keep us feeling disempowered, and when we’re not empowered we’re not much good to anyone, now are we? The trouble with ‘letting go’ of the past is, as with many things, wrapped up in semantics and the difficulty of expressing profound truths through the limitations of language. Such misunderstandings create confusion in regard to where we place our focus and actions and lead to us efforting in all the wrong directions.
When we let go of something in the physical world, it no longer belongs to us. We have given it away. But we can’t do that with our experiences because they will always belong to us on a conscious or unconscious level. You can’t un-experience something. You can’t chuck a memory like an old pair of jeans. There’s no ‘bin for the poor’ in your brain. Whatever you’ve lived up until now, you’re sort of stuck with it.
The past year has been one of extra, mega, major soul searching for me – separating from my husband, my best friend unraveling into a seemingly endless pit of severe mental illness, the ongoing, precarious nature of making my living as an artist – things have been just kinda, a little, really, insanely, intense for me.
When people ask me “So what have you been up to?” it feels like the most honest answer would be:
“Oh, you know… the hero's journey. You?”
This type of consistent and ongoing pressure tends to drudge up the gunk we generally manage to keep hidden, festering just below the surface of normalcy. The sense of vulnerability I’ve experienced this past year and a half, living day to day feeling like an exposed nerve, has made every moment and personal encounter so deeply poignant, that I’ve decided… I'm clearly the creepy kid from “American Beauty” who cries about a plastic bag. Life finds ways, subtle and the not so subtle, to first ask you and then force you to stop the patterns that keep you a prisoner of your own thoughts; and life has been on me about that; good Lord, has it been on me. And I, like the bull-headed person I am, have kicked and screamed back at it the entire time.
“Let go of it,” I’ve told myself over and over. “Let go of it,” says Creepy Kid me.
“I fucking can’t you weirdo!” Yells Bull-Headed me. “You think I want to hold onto this? You think this is how I want to feel?”
“Holding onto it is what is making you feel bad,” says Creepy Kid me.
“That thing is etched into the fabric of me, dumby,” says Bull-Headed me. “What string can I tug on that won’t make the entire thing unravel? Ya though of that? I bet you didn’t.”
And as much as I love Creepy Kid me and dig his wisdom, I sort of have to admit that Bull-Headed me has a point. Once you start yanking at those strings, you can go on unraveling forever. So if we can’t ever really let go of the past, what the hell are we supposed to do with it?
One of my few virtues is that I’m a very forgiving person. I’ve had some nasty people, particularly in my early life, who left some lasting impressions on me. With each of them I was always able to step aside and recognize that their behaviour toward me was based in their pain, that as much as they made me suffer, they were suffering more. I saw that their cruelty derived from their own experiences as victims. Even from quite a young age I understood this intuitively and was able to extend mercy even to my worst enemy. As such I am not one to hold grudges. But what I hadn’t understood, up until very recently, was that even though I had forgiven these people, I had held on to how they had made me feel. And this, I have concluded, is what Creepy Kid me has been asking me to let go of all along.
Those relationships were like mini traumas that shaped my understanding of myself and how I interacted with the world. Those people, through their domination of me had taught me that “I’m too much”. This might sound strange, but it is essentially the same thing as “I’m not enough”. "I’m too much" means I take up too much space; there is no room for my ideas, my feelings, my needs and wants and desires. “I’m too much” tells me my presence is an inconvenience to others; it makes them treat me unkindly. It causes them to push me down.
These people taught me that I needed to shrink in order to fit their conception of me. Taking up my space was dangerous because it would cause them to push up against me, resisting my light. Their resistance caused me pain, and so I learned to shrink. Shrinking didn’t ease the pain, but it did take their focus off of me. For years I shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. I got myself into situations where I was not valued or heard, and instead of removing myself from a toxic environment, I did what my pattern told me to do and shrunk some more. I shrunk until I didn’t recognize myself; until I was utterly consumed with anxiety and fear of life. Any opportunity that arose for me did not seem joyous, but dangerous, because opportunity asks us to expand, and for me to expand I would have to drop a pattern I was not even aware I had. So I came up with excuses: “I don’t know how. It’s not going to work. What’s the point of that anyway?” Anything to avoid letting people see me in my true and powerful form, anything to avoid expanding and taking up my space. My ex, who knows me well, said to me once “I don’t get it. You’re like a lion who’s been trapped by a mouse. You’re a volcano that’s afraid of the rain.” Trouble was I couldn’t stop shrinking, because I didn’t know I was doing it.
I’ve heard many times that the root of unresolved pain is lack of forgiveness. I searched my heart and asked if I still held ill will toward the ones who had wounded me. That’s when I understood it was not the anger, but the pattern that I had not released. I was behaving as if these oppressive people were still around, putting pressure on me to shrink, even though they had left my life long ago. I kept inviting people and circumstances into my life that followed that pattern, and worst of all, I painted my experiences with the brush of that pattern, whether it was true or not.
There is a process of undoing any long held belief, a period of practicing a new way of doing things that feels unnatural until it becomes the new habit. Part of this process for me has actually been about embracing the past, about actively not letting it go. Much of my past experiences are coloured by that shrinking feeling, and yet that feeling was not the reality of the situation. In truth my past holds so much in it that I can bless and give thanks for. Even the difficult times were building blocks toward understanding, the resistance needed to build the muscle. It is the negative feeling pattern that I need to let go of, the tendency to shrink and not be myself in all of my messy glory, that I need to forget. So in a sense, Creepy Kid me and Bull-Headed me were both right and both wrong. They needed to clarify the terms of what they were failing to express succinctly through language. They had to see that they were both trying to address the same need from different vantage points.
My past is mine. It is my story, my hero's journey, my badge of merit. Why would I want to let that go? My past is a goldmine; it is a treasure chest that I have lugged along my path, filling it with the gems of my experience. Instead of letting it go, I am redefining it; I am rescuing it from the erroneous story I repeated to myself about it for so long. I am changing the illusions of lack and trauma to tales of bravery and adventure. In my story I am the queen and the knight and the oracle all in one. From this vantage point, all can be seen as part of the same quest and that which I arrived in this world to understand and experience. I can view it as having been for nothing less than the expansion of my soul; and that my dear, that my dear, that – is worth holding onto.