Today I want to share the lesson of letting go from my mother.  Maybe it’s more accurate to say the lesson of not letting go, specifically what happens when we don’t let go.  My mother is the queen of grudges and I absolutely learned how to do just that from her.  I remembered every nasty thing people said about me and how they treated me and how they made me feel.  I carried it with me as both a defense mechanism and excuse to not get to know people and as an act of martyrdom for when I still gave people chances.  Also a lesson from my mother—we thought it was forgiveness to a degree but the reality is we never forgot any of what happened.  The first impression was it and that is how I defined people moving forward because I learned from my mom that people don’t change and often one bad decision is who they really are.  I cut people out before I even let them in because of a first impression.  I’ve been wrong multiple times, especially as I’ve pointed out these last few weeks.  I was wrong about it with my husband, I was wrong about it with some people I truly now consider friends.  I had been super quick to write them off and after meeting them, I saw a different side.  It’s funny or ironic that often the people we make a judgement on are those who we share similarities with. 

This side of the lesson is about breaking the family pattern of writing people off before we know them.  I experienced loss early in life so I am no stranger to the knowledge once something is gone, it is gone.  Those losses haunted me and left me with a helpless feeling about life and a severe deprivation of faith.  During the holidays we spent a lot of time together with family and there is such a history there—so many dynamics and feelings.  Many of them are entirely justified and I understand the frustration, anger, and resentment.  But is there a purpose to it?  Holding onto that level of emotion for this long with no outlet hasn’t served any purpose other than to exacerbate the negative.  It’s holding onto the coal that’s burning the hand thinking we are going to one day throw it at the person who hurt us—we only end up burning ourselves.  I’ve witnessed first hand the choice to fixate on the negative and how it has taken a lovely evening, a great time together, and completely ruined it because we can’t let go of those feelings.  We want the other person to understand and feel what we did.  We want them to acknowledge their part in how we feel.  If we want to talk about a waste of time, this is it: expecting someone to feel/understand how we feel without explaining it.  I know even if we do explain it there is a chance that they won’t get it, but at least we made the effort and aren’t wasting time expecting people to be mind readers and being upset over something they have no idea made us angry.

We need to heal the past in order to move forward, even if that healing is reconciling that others do not understand or feel the same way we do.  There are things we may never get our due for, we will not get what we feel we are owed.  But holding onto that resentment serves nothing but to ruin the time we have now—and I will repeat it until I’m blue in the face—we never know how much time that is.  Why ruin all potential good times for the sake of holding onto one bad time?  Why allow those feelings or the feeling of one incident determine how we feel the rest of our lives?  And those feelings expand to all of those around us.  There comes a point we have to accept responsibility and understand that we are the one with the issue and we can either address what’s bother us or we can let it go, because holding onto it has done nothing but cause more pain.  Our martyrdom, our righteous anger, does nothing to the other person, but it weighs on our hearts and minds and can drag everyone else down too.  There is no point in making ourselves sink and blaming others for it—we are still the one who drowns.

I held onto things far longer than I should have–some of them were justified and some were not.  I made judgements on people that I shouldn’t have and I regret that because there could have been a great friendship formed much sooner.  There were stupid moments that honestly could have impacted the trajectory of my life had I put aside pride and just tried to understand.  And even now, thinking of that regret serves nothing.  We are here now and the only way to move forward is to move forward.  Cut the ties to what happened and understand that we are here now because of what we did and didn’t do but we can’t change it.  Learn the lesson and move forward, the biggest part of which is not making rash decisions about someone’s character or their intentions.  Don’t decide who we are before we figure out what works for us, meaning don’t write someone off because they are a certain way.  We may have more in common than we think and we just haven’t discovered it yet.  Whatever it may be, put down the coal, cut the line, and let go of the past, of what we thought hurt us and welcome the gift of time we have now.  As long as we have that time, we have the ability to make it better.  Don’t drown in a puddle, find our support and move forward.  Sometimes the person to help you forward is the last person you’d think—we may surprise ourselves as much as they surprise us.  Trust it, let go, and move on to enjoy the time we have.