Letting Go, With Love..
You know the saying “It’s better to love and lose than to not love at all” ? In these past few years, I have gain so much clarity into what that quote means to my experience in life.
Grief is such a weird and complex process. One day you can be feeling perfectly fine and at ease, while the next day it can be extremely difficult just to get out of bed and go about your regular daily activities. My journey with grief has been a very interesting and transformative one that people who know me today probably wouldn’t quite believe, given how much I have changed and how I am better equipped to accept change.
My first significant encounter with grief occurred during my time as a caregiver. Losing my grandfather back in 2017 was an immensely difficult pill to swallow, and it was a heart-wrenching experience that nothing I had encountered before could truly prepare me for. Naturally, in my attempts to cope with this profound loss, I turned to things that I saw others do to take the edge off their pain. I became numb to the world around me and drank a whole lot. The lack of self-awareness and inability to process my grief led me on a journey through a season of survival: functioning from a space of anxiousness, constant worry, and emotional disconnection, where I remained until therapy shifted my perspective from “why did this happen to me?” to “how can this experience grow me?” When most think about their journey with grief, they think about the above scenario, having to process someone dying and no longer being on this Earth. But what if I told you it’s possible to grieve someone or something that you had to let go, as your life shifted you to another space.
As we journey through life, we have the opportunity to shift to different spaces and places where we’ll meet new people, build community, and elevate. Or we can hang on to the familiarity of what we know and remain in a continuous cycle. There are times where you have to take a risk and trust that everything that is for you will eventually align and if something or someone is no longer aligned, they will be removed from your life, whether you like it or not. This is not only true with people, but behaviors, patterns, and places. That stripping of what is comfortable feels a lot like what I felt in losing my grandparents. The change you have to navigate in the uncertainty of a new space, shifting what’s safe, who’s safe and where there is a soft space to land.
I often get asked the question, “Why did you leave New Orleans, and go/come to Baltimore?” And the honest answer looking back is I felt like it was time to leave home and explore something new. Baltimore is just where I landed, it’s what felt right in this season of life. Do I miss home? Yes. There is NO place like New Orleans. But what I also realized is that you can feel when the Spirit is leading you to or away from something and it is up to you to be obedient to where you feel called and allow that to guide you to your next season.
Now, when I think about the process of letting go or releasing someone or something that has played a significant role in my life, I see my time with them as a valuable opportunity to have truly experienced them or that situation during the particular season of my life that I was in at that time. As I shift into new phases of my journey, I understand that I will encounter new experiences that will better serve the direction in which I am headed. Does it hurt to let go? Absolutely! I will not sit here and pretend that there haven’t been numerous times when I did not put up a fight, or when I did not try to excessively victimize myself or hang on tightly in an attempt to control the inevitable. I have certainly been there, having gone through all the emotional struggles. However, what I have ultimately come to realize is that for the sake of my peace, my joy, and for God’s glory, I had to learn to let go with love and acceptance. I needed to show genuine gratitude for each and every moment that person, behavior, or place served in my life, and then gracefully release what I believed the role of each was intended to be. It was at that transformative moment that I believe new things, places, opportunities, and people, all of whom would serve where I am now and equip me for where I am going, began to come into my life in meaningful ways.
This doesn’t mean that a particular thing or person won’t return into your life, (or I won’t eventually move back home… lol), because if that’s what is truly destined for you, nothing or no one can alter God’s Will. BUT… you will have to go through this challenging process because it is building YOU up to become the best and highest version of YOURSELF, enabling your personal growth and development along the way.
Love + Light
