On Letting Go

So, I'm posting this here in lieu of there being a blog function because it relates to my personal growth and I realised something that I wanted to share.

You see, I've had a stressful couple of days. My husband and I are in the very early stages of running a shop and we've been desperately trying to get this month's rent sorted. Fortunately, his mother came through at the last minute but part of our panic was that we felt we couldn't rely on her from the off as she is notoriously fickle and will change her mind on a whim. (He and I were both raised by mothers who we think are probably narcissistic so in his mother's case certainly the apparent fickleness may well play into that.)

Anyway, that's just background. The important thing I realised has to do with letting go.

The thing is, people without mental health issues often don't understand those of us who do have mental health issues. Now, I mean that in a more specific sense that I would say applies to those who aren't just experiencing some form of 'reactive' mental health difficulty but as I don't want to split hairs or isolate people, I'll talk about in the general sense. :)

So the fact is, mentally ill vs non mentally ill people have a difficult time understanding each others' experiences and the analogy I'm about to lay out is part of why.

Imagine you're a person, seemingly made of tar. You wander around doing your day to day stuff, but you can't help but smear tar on everything. Now, unfortunately for you, everyone else seems to be made of stone. Ok, things need to be resilient to cater to stone people but mostly they are clean and every time you as a tar person interact with the stone people you feel awful for touching things/touching people because you always smear them with tar, it's inevitable. However, what you and they don't realise is that you aren't actually made of tar as people think. Everyone was born a stone person, it's just that some stone people find that over time tar clings to them until they can't see the stone person underneath and they think they're made of tar, that they are somehow intrinsically different.

The truth is that if these so called 'tar people' simply allowed themselves to relax and let go, a lot of that tar would slough right off. Yes, you'd still see people who were mostly stone wandering around with bits of tar stuck to them because tar is sticky. The 'pure' stone people would probably still be funny towards them, but for the stone people who were 'tar people' before they would know they had achieved a sense of balance.

Now, what this analogy is attempting to show is that the 'tar' in this case is the stuff of mental health issues. Asssuming as is quite likely, that mental health issues arise because of predispositions then those with mental health issues have started out life as 'stone people with little bits of tar stuck to them' and have become 'tar people' over time, but hey, nevermind, the 'pure' stone people aren't perfect either because they probably have fractures and cracks of their own. Everyone is different, it's just that over time our differences become more noticeable.

So, accordingly, the reason non mentally ill people find us difficult to relate to is that everything slides off them pretty much while it 'sticks' to us. This is not our fault, it's just how it is and in fact when we learn a degree of control and management of this part of ourselves we can help a lot of people because we process things more deeply. The problem arises where non mentally ill people cannot understand why we can't 'just let go' of things and we ourselves are so mired in the fact that 'past experience' has taught us something that we are carrying around the time we thought we were 'awful' at 5,10, 15, 20 years old and thus we have created a perspective in which we are as bad as we think we are and that's all anyone sees. We are tar people besmirching everything we touch, when in fact underneath our accumulated 'awfulness' we are just stone people with bits of tar stuck to us and there is nothing wrong with that. It becomes a problem when we cannot manage it and we end up trapped and apologising for even existing.

The point is, non mentally ill people could do with learning some compassion, but we ourselves could do with learning to let go. The past is the past. It is gone and it can never hurt you again. Memories are just your brain replaying video tapes that it has no use for anymore but hasn't managed to sell at the garage sale and so is desperately clinging onto them. The future is uncertain so the only thing you control is the present. I can attest to how difficult it is to let go even while I'm making progress but we all need to learn and work on it bit by bit, because the fact of the matter is, if the past is gone it no longer exists and therefore, how do you even know that a bad thing is definitely going to happen? Bad things have happened yes but as the song goes, 'that was then and this is now'.

In short, learn to let go. You made mistakes, you said or did things you feel bad about,someone treated you horrendously etc, but those mistakes/harsh things you said and did are gone and done and hopefully the person who hurt you can never do so again. (i.e. if you are out of that situation, and if you are still in it, do what you must to survive, get out and then begin your healing. :) )

I know this is a long post, but if you take nothing else away, just think on this:

The only reason bad things still live inside you is because you remember them. Let them go, let them fade and in time you will heal. :) The past is past, the future is not yet written and only you create your present, no one else. The present is a gift, use it wisely and with love for yourself (and by extension others but most importantly you) and you can't go wrong.

I hope that helps. :)