Letting Go

An Act of Cowardice

My first memory of letting go is from when I was about five or six years old.

We had some guests over, en famile, and their child, only a wee bit younger than I, was captivated by a toy I had been gifted by someone who'd traveled overseas and knew that this kind of thing is exactly what children everywhere covet even if we here couldn't imagine it then. As was I.

You see, I wasn't gifted many toys. A battery-operated pup that trotted around -- white, fluffy, and just so damn cute. An Onida TV kind of toy: all the neighborhood's envy and the owner's few childhood joys. As our guests were leaving, someone from my side — and gosh, I'm glad I do not recall who — suggested the toy be given to this child.

"Why? This is mine.”

"It's all right, let it go, we'll get another," they said with the smarmy tone that accompanies all such lies, even while the other side protested.

I was brought up to be painfully polite so there was no question of saying a teary-eyed, or even worse, a tantrumy "Bye."

I let it go.

Today, I know for sure that when I say I've let something or someone go, I lie. I've only let myself down, one more time. I should have dug in my tiny little heels and stood my ground., screaming, "No, I will not let it go," and hung onto my toy with dear life. But I wanted to be better than a dog with a bone.

How many such 'toys' has the child in me let go in the bid to be that thing people call "mature"? Countless — the small, the forgotten, the significant, the 'it-wasn't-meant-to-be', the 'bygones be bygones' — each has redefined my life, like the red car on Google Maps that shakes when it needs to reroute me.

You ask, "Name some?" My dream of becoming a teacher. My desire to be child-free. My 'Happy Marriage". That job at Microsoft so I could get a longer maternity leave where I was. That Master's degree. All let go for good reasons, and sometimes for someone else's dreams.

"But things have mostly turned out well, no?" Yes, no cap, but that's not because I let go, but I let it be. Otherwise, I wouldn't be in therapy, would I?

"Okay, okay, let's just do that other thing grown-ups are meant to do: Calm down. Surely, there must be some things that you've 'let go' that have sparked joy, Marie Kondo-style?"

My hair. My long hair. Letting that go. That piece of full-frontal vanity, unlike lacy lingerie, that seemed to take an increasing amount of keratinous care and cruel criticism! Even today, when I sit myself down in my stylist's chair, and she begins by taking hold of a bunch of my short hair to make it shorter, the joy. It's like someone freeing Sisyphus' hands from his rock. And I luxuriate in the sounds: the whisper-soft snips, the razor-hum on my neck, the blow-dryer's whoosh, and that thing she does to thin and shed and thin and shed, looking down at the now mostly white threads of a carpet I no longer want to tread.

Otherwise, I now hold tight to things I like, that make me feel alive.

There are no brownie points for letting go, and I haven't enough time left for admiring the breadcrumbs of my life.

Letting go is an act of cowardice.