I thought I had already learned something about letting go and then life asked me again.
The first time, it came through burnout. Few years ago.
Life made this decision for me.. Like in these moments when the grip is broken because you no longer have the strength to keep holding on.
What I thought was resilience was, in part, attachment.
To identity. To performance. To being the one who keeps going.To my idea that I should / need to achieve, should be recognised, should succeed.
Burnout forced my hand.
But the second time was different.
Few months ago I was sitting with the growing sense that I no longer felt aligned with my doctorate research.
I knew it had drifted from what was true. We drifted apart like a pair of lovers whose passion faded away, still respectful but no longer in love.
The topic, the relationship with supervisors, the feeling that I was doing it more for how it looked than for what it meant. The attachment to the ideas I created for what it will give me. To myself constructed purely in my head.
And yet I kept thinking:
What will people think?How will they judge me?
Then, in a conversation with a friend (MC, thank You!), something became suddenly clear:
I didn’t want it anymore.
It was no longer mine to continue.
So I let it go. I felt lighter immediately. Filed the paperwork the same day and never looked back.
That experience taught me something important.
Sometimes life takes things from us before we are ready.
And sometimes life asks us to release them ourselves.
The second is muc harder. At least for me.
To walk away from a title, a path, a version of legitimacy.To loosen our grip not because we are exhausted, tired, depleted, but from self- awareness and courageous decision to listen to ourselves in creating the life we want.
There is something deeply human in this.
The self we build is often made of expectations
(well, at least for me)
who we should become, what we should achieve, how we should be seen.
Burnout showed me the cost of carrying that self.
Letting go of my doctorate was the moment I began to set it down consciously.
And perhaps that is what many transitions ask of us:
Not failure.
Not defeat.
But the courage to release what no longer belongs to us.
Much love,
R
P.S. this is the last piece in my little impermanent human arc- Arrival- Becoming- Fear- Grief- Letting Go
A cycle of life.
I hope you found something that resonates in any of these pieces. Thank You for reading.
