Another fall and I’ve lost another Aunt.  I’m almost numb to the way this year has gone.  I can’t say I’m not hopeful for a good turn around, but this is not what I thought it would be.  And now this loss, a year after my last Aunt, all while things seem to be turning around, has created such a mixed feeling of…otherness.  This year has been a wake up call to me that I do not want to continue in a certain vein where people tell me what to do—I’ve always had that underlying drive that didn’t want to report to anyone, that thought I knew best, that found my own way.  And, as I shared a few weeks ago, I’ve realized how much of that was ego.  I felt guilty for wanting the things I did, I restricted myself hoping for the even bigger pay off, and when it didn’t come, I felt like my world was falling apart.   

We can’t make people be who we want them to be.  People react very differently to stressors and seeing the condition of her house is a testament to someone going one way with tragedy.  She tried to freeze time.  The house was still a mess and this isn’t about cleanliness.  This is about how she tried to hold onto everything that was once the loss happened-and she did it repeatedly at different stages.  The brain handles trauma differently and she definitely faced trauma, loss after loss.  I feel like I relate to her in some ways—it’s why I cling to things in the past as well.  But I see the way she let her life fall apart, how the pain became too much.  And I see the parallel to the loss of influential people in my life early on—as she lost her father, I lost my grandfather, I feared death, I feared more loss.  I have relics of time gone by and I know that it wasn’t normal.  So I began cleaning all of that and then I walk into this and I am proud I started when I did. But this isn’t about cleaning and clearing and talking about the positivity of letting go—again.  It’s about understanding where we are at and meeting ourselves there and then reframing our lives.  When the foundation, the walls, whatever gets knocked down, build something new, don’t try to make it what it was.   

This loss is also a testament to letting people in.  When tragedy happens, we aren’t meant to isolate.  My entire family has a history of doing that—we can handle it on our own.  But seeing how life can become so unmanageable after loss, our minds can become unmanageable, it makes me realize that there is infinitely more we can let go of.  We hold onto things thinking it will help us remember—and it does.  It’s a record of our lives, the experiences we’ve shared.  But the things aren’t the experience itself.  The things aren’t a substitute for the person.  I know I have the things I do because I didn’t want to let go of the person, the idea, the image.  This was a circumstance where positivity and love and trying to refocus didn’t help a damn thing.  There are certain depths that it’s too deep for any of us to go—and it’s painful to witness that sinking in people.  I feel that sinking tendency in myself—between new responsibilities, uncertainty at work/home, troubles in relationships, health scares, losing my support system, this has been the time when I wanted to give it all up again.   

But what I’m seeing is that people will never be who we want them to be, who we think they are.  With all of these losses I’m seeing that I’m missing the version of who they were—not the version of who they became.  The people they became are not the people I knew as a child—that person never would have allowed themselves to fall apart like that.  And then I see that the truth is they will always be themselves and we have no say in how they live their lives.  We have an image, a perception of people and when we get behind the scenes, we see who they really are.  They aren’t always capable or they never were the version of themselves we thought they were.  We can watch people deteriorate, we can offer the life preserver, but if they aren’t willing to grab it, they won’t survive.  We can’t make people be the best of themselves if they don’t see it in themselves.  Not to be dramatic but there has been a lot of tragedy, loss, and near loss in my life starting from a young age and I have a firm example now of what happens when we don’t deal with that—my Aunt shared a similar story line.  I will not let my life fall apart because I can’t hold onto all of the what was.  And that sucks because some of that what was, was really good.  It felt good.  It was who I thought I was, it was a part of me.  So how do we evolve this complicated relationship where that version of ourselves, the one we held up as the epitome of the greatest because we didn’t know what the greatest was… is exactly what’s drowning us?

We have to let go.  Sometimes we have to dive deeper so we can get our bearings and then we come up for air.  We touch the things that triggered us in the first place.  We get close to the pain and see that we can survive it—if we let ourselves go through it.  My boss/mentor/owner of the company suffered a huge loss at the height of the evolution of the company.  She could have easily let herself drown in it, go down with it.  But she didn’t.  And clearly the point of this story is that no two people handle that circumstance the same way, but this is moreso about choice and mindset.  We need to train ourselves to find the way out by seeing where the light gets in through the cracks.  We have to know when to break down the door and when to walk to the next one.  This loss sucks, nearly any loss sucks.  But if we can take it for what it is and learn something from it, break the patterns, then there is a chance it doesn’t all have to fall apart.  And even if it does, we can rebuild.  Don’t let the fire consume us, learn to rise from the ash and make something else.