A year ago, I was desperately holding onto parts of my life out of a fear that losing them would be losing parts of me. I held tightly to people, addictive behaviors and beliefs that ultimately made me a toxic person. My biggest fear became losing things that I had attached myself to, built my identity into and built my life around.
Today I find this ironic, because I am the queen of losing things. My keys, my wallet, my phone. Last year, I probably spent a third of the time I spent with my best friend searching for things I had misplaced. When we were searching for my wallet for the millionth time, she would always say, “You would lose your head if it wasn’t attached to your body,” and she was probably right. But losing people that I loved made me scared that I wasn’t going to be me afterwards. I had built my identity around toxic relationships and unhealthy habits. They became apart of me to the point that the idea of living without them caused me severe anxiety.
Loss is a hard thing to categorize. There’s loss that’s permanent, the kind of loss that comes without warning and then there’s the kind of loss that is voluntary; when you choose to let go of something in hopes that it’ll make you a better person. While I lost things like my wallet everyday, losing people was harder for me. I was convinced that everyone that came into my life needed to stay in my life; that I could hold onto people hard enough and that would fix any problems we had. If I could just get them to listen to me, if I could just say the right thing, or show them that, whatever our problem was, it wasn’t actually a big deal, that then we would be okay.
In the last half of this past year, I came to realize that my extreme effort to avoid loss was turning me into the kind of person I didn’t want to be. My friendships were constantly pushed to the breaking point, my mental state became even more fragile as I stretched myself thin trying to keep people in my life that were clearly not good for me, and my physical health declined as I refused to let go of behaviors that pushed my body to its limits.
The second half of this last year came with the acceptance that not everything that I lost was a loss. I learned to build my identity on my own and not around other people, I learned healthy ways to deal with stress, and I finally accepted that my anxiety was a significant stressor in my fear of loss. The most important lesson I learned in the last year was how important letting things go is. I could have saved myself a significant amount of pain if I had let go of things when it was time, instead of dragging it out for months in efforts to prevent the inevitable.
While the last year came with all these realizations and healthy lifestyle changes, I still have a long way to go. Learning what kind of role loss has in my life has made me more aware of my anxiety, but I haven’t learned to manage it as well as I should. I also have old relationships that were pushed to the breaking point due to my overbearing ways that need mending. Both can’t be done overnight and could be something I’m still working on a year from now, but I’m so grateful that I had these experiences. The things I’ve lost in the last year certainly won’t be the last and I can’t break down every time it happens in the future. Though it was a painful year, I really did come out of it stronger and more accepting of change. The last year taught me more about myself than any other year, and with these new revelations, I’m excited to see what I can accomplish this year.