I'll see you on the other side...

Is giving up the same as letting go –

Some days ago I let go of a friend, the friend probably thinks I abandoned them, that I gave up on them. For me the jury is still out on what the difference is.

In my mind I know that I have to be less invested in the outcomes of other peoples lives, that I have no control over the choices and decisions people make, no real influence at all in fact.

That when a person is in the grip of an addiction their only salvation is themselves , that you may look upon someone you love and see a drowning person that you think you can save. The truth, the reality is you cannot.

Addiction is defined as among other things “an enslavement to”

You can stand on the shore and watch the black swirling waters of this, you can hold out your hands, begging cajoling and threatening the person you love, willing them to choose you, to choose life and to choose love over the addiction that is killing them.

I have had to wonder at what the view from the depths of addiction are, from where I stand all I see is blackness sucking you deeper and deeper – I see no good outcome, no happiness, no “big party” I see turmoil and great chunks of life breaking away being destroyed. Friends and family being smashed against the rocks of lies and deceit .

But what do you see…..?

Do you see me standing on a self righteous pillar? Do you see my desire to separate you from this thing you think you cannot live without?  What gave birth to this resentment in you, this hatred? This place where I am standing does it look barren to you filled with a nothingness, an endless tedium does it look dull and dreary?

Perhaps you pity me as much as I do you? Perhaps you think all life ends in death and if yours does so at the bottom of a bottle of the end of a line it seems better to you than age and decrepitude .

And what of my addictions – my addiction to rescuing, my fulfillment  from saving, from loving without love in return, the cigarettes I smoke, the coffee I drink, the enormous amounts I feed my ego the food thinly veiled as success?

And this is where I thank you, I thank you for seeing myself in you, for allowing me to find my own personal hell for seeing the addict that lives in me.

For understanding that I cannot erase this thing in me but just as I see you and wish you had the fortitude not to pick up another drink to be able to walk away from the drugs, I am challenged to stop doing the things that I have done to just stop, to “just say no” – to quote Nancy Reagan

This is why I am letting you go, this is my healing, my salvation – this is serenity. I accept I cannot change you.

Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do, the most loving thing – is to do nothing at all, and in this I honor both of us.

letting go

 have been saying goodbye to some things in my life lately, and in biding my farewells I have learned some new things….

We don’t say goodbye to people we say goodbye to the relationship, the association, the amorphous blend of you and them, this itself is not a farewell but a parting. It is the extraction of the nebulous you that floats around outside your body and has become entangled with the soul of another human.

This “parting”  is where you  call your spirit back to yourself, I discovered that this is not like whistling for a dog, it is more akin to trying to fill a jar with smoke.

However as the hours stretch into days and those add up to weeks you seem to find bits of  yourself, little solid chunks of you, that you lost somewhere along the way.

I have been gathering these little bits of me, some of them no longer fit into this multi dimensional jigsaw puzzle called being, I have looked at them carefully and examined myself to try and find how this idea or belief that I had temporarily let go of belongs, some have had to be gently placed back down as there was no place for them, others I discovered where like finding your old soft sleeping shirt, worn in and comfortable and fits back into as if the parting had been brief.

Then as the weeks become months you put that which is past behind you, in a very real sense, you learn the lessons at best, acknowledge the pain and the unpleasantness and let it all go. What to do with the good memories, the times you laughed, the times you believed yourself happy? I have looked at those things to and careful packed them away – they will live forever in a box in my mind, they do not exist in my present and have no place in my future, but somewhere I believe the lesson must be to never forget the best version of you on the days that were good.