LETTING GO: The Stuff of Life
In my basement there are six bright blue, 18-gallon plastic storage tubs. Take the lid off any one and you’ll find a mix of unsorted photos, child’s artwork, school reports, sports medals, and decades-old certificates. Somewhere in one of those six tubs are our college diplomas and wedding photos (ok, maybe there are eight tubs, or ten if you count the ones that have favorite clothes, blankets, and toys from when our kids were little). In our storage unit, you’ll find a doll house, a baby crib, a blue sportscar bed, and more tubs. I recently opened one and found baby dolls, baby doll clothes, and tiny teddy bears for the baby dolls. Another lifting of a lid revealed Barbie-sized Star Wars dolls complete with lightsabers and other weapons. Not only could I not let go of my own kids’ toys, apparently, I couldn’t let go of their toys’ toys. As I stared down into Luke Skywalker’s eyes, I couldn’t help thinking, How has this happened? “This” being the fact that the daughter and son who played with said toys have both graduated college, gotten full-time jobs, and moved out.
During the recent pandemic, I decided it was time to finally sort through and make sense of 25+ years of stuffed away life that I fondly call keepsakes. I started by tackling exactly ONE tub on a Sunday afternoon in early April. Among a bunch of meaningless paper, I found letters I had written to my kids on their second and seventh birthdays. They were sweet and fun snapshots into their personalities at those ages, and I can’t explain why the other 20+ birthdays got skipped. I also found the flowered, fabric-covered journal that I wrote in sporadically from ages 15 to 19. I got sidetracked and read it in its entirety and then ripped it up page by page, sending it fluttering into a garbage bag filled with SpongeBob coloring pages and bad photos. Looking back, I see that this was a strange reaction, but for all of the stuff I wasn’t ready to let go of, I WAS ready to let go of my angsty teenage self.
I left that first sorting session feeling nauseous, foggy-headed, and overwhelmed.
Part of my visceral reaction came from beating myself up for having such important pieces of our lives haphazardly thrown into tubs I bought at Target. The other part came from knowing that I was in no way ready to continue sorting, but I also wasn’t ready to let go, either. My ambivalence is what created this mess, and my ambivalence was keeping me stuck in it, too.
I’ve read enough self-help books to recognize that my physical world usually mirrors my inner world. When my purse is highly disorganized, so is my brain. When my closet is teeming with unfolded clothes and disorganized shelves, I’m usually avoiding something in real life, too. So as I got up from my spot on the basement floor feeling like I had a cheap wine hangover, I let the thought cross my mind that all of this stuff must represent some deeply buried inner turmoil. Trudging up the steps, taking a few deep breaths, I mulled over the questions, Why am I so bad at letting go of this kind of stuff? Why didn’t I keep up with this as time went by? Why am I still not ready to face this?
As I headed to take a shower, my brain continued to fiddle with the questions, like trying to work a knot out of a necklace. What would a normal person keep? Meaningful things, good pictures, important awards, one doll, one blanket, no baby shoes or sweatshirts or school uniforms. As the shower loosened the muscles from hours of sitting on the floor, a thought stealthily crept into consciousness, like the one rub of the necklace chain that suddenly frees the knot: You’re trying to preserve it ALL; You’re trying to preserve it ALL for them because yours was shattered.
Damn, shower, you make everything so dramatic.
Shattered seemed like such a strong word, and I knew right away my thought was taking me backward to when my parents divorced when I was young. For years, I’ve stood by the statement that my life is better because I’m the child of divorce – not always easier, but better for sure. And I still believe that. The divorce that happened when I was six saved my family in many ways, and multipliers of good things came from it. I completely love both of my parents and admire them (I’m still finding new things to admire about my mom, who is one of my greatest friends and advisors, and my dad, who has been gone over 11 years, and I still think of daily). But as a kid, that initial baseball-through-the-window shattering that causes you to startle and flinch when you find out your family is changing, never completely goes away. There are ripples, and I’m pretty sure that me clinging so tightly to my own family of four and all of the stuff that represents that life might be a 40-year-old ripple.
My heart has grown softer to how terrible it must have been for both of my parents to sit down a six and eight-year-old and deliver this kind of news, knowing they were going to break hearts, knowing that their own hearts were broken, knowing that in the coming days and years they would be facing new challenges, tolerating more uncertainty and letting go of dreams they had for themselves, too. I look back on their young selves, picturing them in the last home I remember all of us in, and as my current self, now much older than them at that moment, I want to give them each a hug and tell them that it’s all going to work out. I want to tell that little girl and her big brother, that it’s all going to work out. The panes get rebuilt, lives get healed, love continues and even multiplies.
If you’ve ever been to therapy, you know there are breakthrough moments. Usually a revelation comes to the surface, the tears flow, and a giant weight is lifted. The shower that day was a breakthrough moment. I recognized that my holding on to all of this stuff is a misguided attempt to safeguard me (and my family) from anything terrible happening. I realized that for years I had been on guard waiting for another baseball through the window, bracing myself for the noise and the startle that comes with it. And I thought if I just collected enough stuff, I could prove this would not happen to me. This was a pretty major revelation for a Sunday afternoon during a pandemic, so I cried in the shower, stepped out and shoved it aside, and continued about my life, a life that did not involve sorting through any more tubs.
In July, I decided that I needed to clean up some of my inner world if I ever had a chance of confronting the big blue tubs again. So during the week of my 48th birthday, I made a list of 48 things I was ready to let go of. The list came out in fits and spurts, sometimes by ones and twos and sometimes by the dozen. By the time the week was over and I completed and read my list, I recognized how difficult, yet freeing it would be to truly let go of these things that were no longer serving me or those I love. The list went well beyond those tough childhood moments and the hoarding of my children’s keepsakes. I found all sorts of things that I had been unknowingly holding onto. It was one of the best mental exercises I’ve done in years.
I don’t have enough hubris to think that my shattering moment is even a fraction of what others, including some of the people in my own family, have dealt with. My story has a happy ending, a life filled with giving and receiving love, and a long and fun-loving marriage. Through my own reflection though, I recognize that those moments that temporarily shatter us, no matter where they fall on the scale of despair, can cause us to hold onto things - physical things, beliefs, relationships, ways of living - as a form of self-preservation. Sometimes this self-preservation lasts too long and can morph into an overcompensation that puts us on a path to anxiety, or depression, or even loneliness. This new knowledge gives me more compassion for others, especially when they’re behaving in ways that I don’t understand, or seem to be acting in self-destructive or counter-productive ways. It also gives me more compassion for myself and my stuffed plastic tubs and my upset stomach on that day in April.
Through this pandemic I’ve been trying to keep track of things that likely would not have happened without it – letting go is one of the perks of this strange and terrible time. We’ve all had to let go in one way or another. As I was thinking about this while putting away some laundry the other day, it also dawned on me that an important part of letting go is holding on. I have so many moments from childhood that are so worth holding on to. I can’t discount the wonderful things that came out of that initial heartache – an independence and strength of spirit fostered by my mother, a strong relationship with my brother, and a deep, abiding commitment to create a strong and loving marriage and family. Strength times three.
So I wrote a companion list of 48 things I want to hold onto, things I’m grateful for, moments I don’t want to forget, and gifts that were born from pain. I now see it’s easier to hold on to these kinds of things in my memory or on paper and not by squirreling away birthday cards from my son’s 7th birthday or a soccer trophy that’s meaningless to my daughter. The holding on to the right things is part of the letting go of the things that no longer serve us. And sometimes we have to be forced to take a step back to see what it is we’re gripping too tightly and why. Letting go is how the new stuff, the good stuff, gets in.
It’s been over a week since I made my lists, and I still haven’t been downstairs to tackle the scads of stuff that wait for me, but I’m hopeful and not dreading the process. I’d like to condense things down to one tub for each of us, a kind of time capsule of the last 25 years, with the things that are meaningful and elicit joy. My overflowing plastic tubs ended up teaching me a lesson I’m not sure I could have learned any other way, that the hard moment 40 years ago didn’t shatter us, it made us stronger – letting go and holding on to that has been a long time coming.
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