Letting Go

If there's something that I've learned about in the past year, it's letting go of things. Letting go of feelings, people, ideas, futures. It's certainly and important skill to develop, though to master it makes you almost inhuman. People must grope in the dark to find the courage to continue on without something that seemed almost essential, or at least quite important.

Loss is something people feel very differently. Some obsess for years over what they could have done to prevent its occurence. The real truth is that such notions don't matter in the least. Certainly, there is value in retrospection, in peering back at the mistakes you make so as to not make them again, but obsession is unhealthy. Be assured that those around you, despite how graceful they might seem in their handling of grief, all wounds scar in some shape or form.

When someone loses something or someone they care about, it's tempting to simply fall apart, to mourn the loss so extensively that you lose your own self-conception. You become your grief. It's tempting to blame yourself for things, but in actuality it's never that simple. You are what you are, and you can't be anything else in a puff of smoke.

The lingering pain is what gets people, what ruins people. The initial loss will always be a shock to the system, whether a good friend or a lover, but if one makes the conscious decision to begin to heal, the process begins almost immediately. Acceptance is the final stage of grief for a very good reason; you have to trudge through everything else before you can truly accept the events of your life. Without that initial agony and pain, accepting the events in your life is meaningless.