Washing Myself in the Words I Never Had the Guts to Say – a reflection on what it means to ‘let go’ in a healthier way

In the pit of my stomach, knotted together with anxiety and fear and a whole hoard of other emotions lays the anger I keep trying and failing to get rid of. My hands that remain curled into a fist, a brain that constantly feels like it’s on fire, a heart that hurts and hurts no matter what I do.

I hold anger at my mother, for giving my sister all the love she has and forgetting about me, at my father, who held me to standards that felt too high. Anger towards the people I love for never asking if I’m still alive, for failing to notice that when I don’t show up, it’s because I couldn’t get myself out of bed that day. I hold anger at myself for not being able to heal, for not being able to get over the adversities and the mountains stacked in my path. For not being able to give myself the love and support I so desperately need, for often failing to be a functioning human being.

I have come to the realization that instead of making anything better, I was allowing my brain to become a petri dish of terrible thoughts and frustration. We are constantly hanging onto all the things we should’ve said goodbye to, we are, more often than not, the root source of all the yelling and anxiety we feel.

Most of us, to some extent, have an unhealthy idea of what it is to ‘let go’.

I have never allowed myself to feel anything to it’s highest extent, instead choosing to shut down or ignore it. Healing is too often associated with being unaffected; we tend to believe that we have to push everything away in order to remain intact and sane.

I know now that there is no better way to heal than to allow ourselves to feel every broken emotion and hurricane inside of us, that there is no better way to let the sunlight in than to embrace the cracks.

So it is now, with all the love and warmth I have inside of me, that I have finally started to free myself from the years of anger and angst and irritation.

That means dancing alone in the kitchen at 8 p.m. on a weekday,
Sitting on the floor of the shower for twenty minutes, crying so loudly and so wholeheartedly and being unsure if it’ll ever stop,
Hugging the people we love and not worrying about whether or not they love us back.

It means feeling every tangled, broken emotion, it means washing ourselves in the words we never had the guts to say, it means unraveling the love from the hate and pouring all of it into one person at a time, it means being alive in the most raw and literal sense of the word.

I will become the person with all the sunlight inside of her, that’s a promise.

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About the Writer

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Blog: rosettta.wordpress.com

**Also, check out the piece she wrote for Feminine Collective: High School is Quicksand