“Don’t ever give up!” is a dialogue that has echoed around me for so many years. We are all taught fables and epics, about the value of resilience, of holding on, no matter how uncomfortable it gets. The human has an obsession with familiarity, with belonging. A person that you share everything with, a friend that has been with you for years, a watch that doesn’t work but has its outline imprinted on your wrist or a routine that you follow simply out of superstition. We love being in our usual surroundings, with our usual people and around our usual things. When too much of what we are used to suddenly changes, we’re not going to be gleeful about it.
The feeling of belonging with a person, a group, a setting, satisfies this quench for familiarity, and that’s essentially why we hate the act of letting go. The change will always face resistance from within us. Because to remove yourself from an unhealthy environment is terribly hard, even when your gut tells you that it’s the right thing to do. And for some unbeknownst reason, society and its discourse have glorified the act of holding on since millennia. Since the default is to hold on, in order to muster up the courage to remove yourself from draining situations, you need to grow, learn and evolve over time. You need to reject your love for the static and test out new places, feelings and most significantly, remind yourself over and over again, to get out of the comfort zone.
We all have elements of logic and emotion in us. But to comprehend if your decision to let go, to move on, comes from rational thinking and strong feeling, you need to ruminate on it.Â
Think: What would your life look like in 5 years if you don’t get out of this situation? Are you holding on because you know that it has a purpose for you, or are you holding on because it’s uncomfortable to think of a life without that piece of familiarity? And not everything you need to get away from is inherently “bad”, they could just be meant for temporary refuge, or they could just be far away from your goals and purpose.
Furthermore, we don’t have to rip it off like a Band-Aid. Actually, we can’t really pull the trigger like that. Before you even consciously think of leaving, your brain has already been collecting signs of how the circumstance has been taxing you, your body has started to absorb stress and your mind has started to slowly detach. It is only after all these processes start, that you begin seriously questioning the setting.Â
But after we perform our act of outstanding courage and bravery, that is, we remove ourselves from the situation or the situation from us, there comes this lapse of numbness, where we ask ourselves, “What now?”. We go into metacognition mode and question our feelings, our decisions, our personality, everything. And that’s exactly what you need. If you stayed within that comfortable coop of habit, you would never be out of your comfort zone like this, deep in introspection, looking to find yourself and your purpose.
Sometimes, absence is the greatest gift. Sometimes, loneliness is the best companion you get. Because it is only then that you have space to reinvent everything about and around you. It is the dawn of a new life, of a sharper purpose. This is our time to formulate boundaries and milestones and it’s also the time to go back to ourselves, bringing back the mundane bliss and little hobbies we used to indulge in. So to say goodbye is not to change absolutely or completely, to say goodbye is to show love for the life that you’ve built on since your first cry.