In my few years of being a young adult, I’ve learned many things while in college and maturing into adulthood, but nothing could have ever prepared me for how hard learning to let go is. Letting go is harder and easier in different seasons of life, I feel. Some instances being more willing, and others feeling like it’s something that I’ll have to continually work on throughout my life.
Letting go, though, isn’t forgetting or rejecting something departing or happening in your life. Rather, it is the acceptance and passing of something that changed you (yes, either positively or negatively). Just like healing, letting go is not linear. For most, it takes time to even start to come to terms with it. After any uncomfortable instance, we develop a natural defense mechanism to try to avoid it from happening again, and in this, it is very easy to make ourselves relive our hurt from the past.
To find lasting peace about something, we have to allow ourselves to feel every emotion we feel in response to whatever is on our minds. Give each feeling time and embrace each one as a key step in your healing process. Setting boundaries is another great way of gaining trust/confidence in yourself after an uncomfortable or stressful situation. Boundaries protect but also encourage our power to remain where it belongs, within ourselves and at bay for whenever we need to enforce them.
A vital component in learning to let go is understanding that whatever the outcome of the situation was, you’re in control of what happens from now on. Your future is in your hands, and your power is already within yourself. Coming to terms with that you are not the circumstances that you’ve unfortunately have had to encounter is a huge part of letting go in dealing with guilt as well. Guilt, along with other reactive emotions like shame and embarrassment, gives the illusion that the problem is ourselves, leaving no room or chance for improvement.
As adults, it’s easy to be like, “I have everything under control,” when in reality, we’re barely making it through and trying our best to keep it pushing. Letting go, in part, is gaining back the ability to better ourselves as it reveals where we struggled from, not letting it have power over us anymore. By no means am I saying that letting go is the end all be all for all circumstances. More serious matters require care and external closure to feel at peace with, and that is totally valid. But for circumstances within ourselves, those that maybe we give too much time and thought to, those can be simply momentary hardships if we allow ourselves the grace to start healing from them.
We are our worst critics, but that is because we know ourselves the best. In the same regard, this can offer us a brand new perspective on who we are. Introspection, the study and betterment of oneself holistically, is where growth begins. The biggest disservice you can do to yourself in your youth and young adult life and really, throughout life, is to deny yourself the chance to improve and grow. Look at yourself as you would with anyone else, are you giving yourself grace? Are you comforting yourself? Most importantly, are you rooting for yourself?
Just as it is important to check up on the ones closest to you, always make sure to listen within yourself when something is wrong. You’ll never regret going the extra mile for yourself.