i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
July 25, 2006
Last night I went to art therapy and for the first time in a couple of weeks I got a chance to really talk to Dr. M. I�d maybe like to write about what was said yesterday, but for now I�m going to post an entry I actually wrote a couple of months ago but never posted, and which I was reminded of last night. It seems even more relevant now that I might have a lot of letting go to do in a couple of months.
Recently (where by recently I mean for the past 6 months or so) I have been thinking a lot about letting go, and my disinclination to do so. Right before I left for Ireland I was reading Philip Roth�s Letting Go, which I never finished (and didn�t return to the library until AFTER I got back from Ireland, thus incurring a 100 pound fine), but I think I got the gist. Sometimes you have to let go of past bitterness, anger, betrayal, disappointments, and even happiness in order to move forward unburdened.
This is a concept I mostly consciously refuse to grasp.
I am by nature�and I mean that genetically (thanks, Mom)�a packrat. I save movie ticket stubs, programs, flowers. I even have a few receipts and a lot of boarding passes saved. If it happened in the visible light spectrum, I most probably have a picture of it somewhere. I have moved around a lot and refuse to get rid of things, as anyone who has helped me move or stored my stuff can attest. (Thanks, by the way.) This tendency to hoard applies as much to emotional things and experiences as it does to the physical manifestations of those experiences.
I have been told by friends, relatives, and exes alike that I need to learn how to let go, especially when holding on starts to take its inevitable negative toll on me. Some people just shut things out or ignore an issue until they are somehow rid of it. Others make a conscious decision to leave issues at the wayside. Ideally, if I were to embrace this idea of letting go, my way of doing it would involve analyzing it to the very end, isolating it to one small point, to the very core of the issue, and then letting that tiny bit of concentrated energy drift into the abyss. This, at least, is how I deal with physical pain. I figure it should work too for emotional pain. But while I have used this method to dwindle a particular pain or other to a tiny, focused point, I generally cannot bring myself to let it drift into the abyss.
The truth is I don�t want to let go.
Some people think that I only make things harder on myself for being this way. Some, I am sure, have thought me pathetic. Most, I think, cannot imagine why I would purposefully hold on to certain things that are over and done with, and which might continue to make me unhappy on some level, no matter how subconscious.
But I have a �thing� about consistency, especially when it comes to relationships (romantic and otherwise). I am one of those people who think that if you can claim that you no longer love someone then you never really loved them in the first place. [Or, until very recently I was one of those people. I am currently trying to figure out if I still think that�s true. If so, then I�m in a whole lot of trouble.]
My not wanting to let goedness has been tested tremendously over the past couple of years. I moved away from Philly, and I didn�t want to let go of that city or the life I�d had there, which sort of meant that I wasn�t really living life here. I had a falling out (though it was more of a falling apart) with my best friend from middle and high school, the girl who I felt was a sister and not just a friend, and I am still unable to think of her and us without a sharp stab of sadness. I have made meek attempts to repair the damage there, but she is just not having it, and I am still having a hard time dealing with the fact that the girl I once shared everything with for a good 9 years is no longer really a part of my life, and hasn�t been for a couple of years now. And, yes, there have been romantic upsets too, where countless people have yelled at me to LET. IT. GO. And I have stubbornly held on.
The thing is, it�s not that I�m not capable of letting go of those people, or that I am still even really emotionally attached to them. It�s that I�m not willing to let go of the parts of myself that are inextricably intertwined in them and the experiences we shared. I�m not willing to say I no longer love them, because to me it is tantamount to saying I never loved them. I don�t want to say that certain people or events no longer matter, because in so doing I feel I might lose entire gaps of myself.
As a slightly more humorous and literal illustration: After I began my path to weight loss over two years ago and had lost my first ten pounds (4.5 kgs) or so, I remember telling my mother and sister that I felt kind of sad. Though they had caused me some measure of agony, the rings of fat around my waist, those clumps of cellulite on my thighs had been a part of me for a while, and on some level I felt like I was losing and betraying an old, comfortable, warm friend. Now, I am obviously happier and healthier being a size 8-10, but I am also actually grateful to have had the experience, at least, of having been a size 16. Is that really strange?
(By the way, as further evidence of the inheritedness of my hoarding nature when I related the above feelings my sister scoffed in horror, while my mother said a little wistfully, �I know exactly what you mean.�)
So, this is the conclusion I�ve come to: I�d generally rather bear a load of something�even if it only exists in my own memory�than deal with the vacuum that will be left instead. I�d rather carry with me the fullness and messiness of what has been, than walk unencumbered into what is yet to come. I can bear the burden of an uphill future. What I do not want to bear is the lightness of an unburdened past.