Could you tell me a time you felt you couldn’t let go?

Just recently I had a pretty big mental breakdown, everything changed, new roommates, my work was being shifted around and my relationship was on the rocks. I grabbed a cheap book, drove to the beach and just wrote what I felt in that moment. Which is, what follows:

“I can’t let go. I know it’s okay, but it doesn’t feel okay. It only feels okay later, once my damage has already been done and no one else is okay. I feel like no one really understands me, I feel hopeless. I feel like a bad person. That evil feeling ‘everyone hates me’, creeps in far too often, it’s a feeling that gobbles me. I feel like that weird kid, the one where only their mum thinks they’re not… she tells me things that don’t feel real. I don’t feel smart like she says, and only sometimes do I feel pretty.. and then I look at my ginormous forehead (thanks dad). She tells me I deserve everything, I feel like I deserve nothing. How do I invest my time into something positive, and still feel okay. How do I not feel stressed? What is letting go? How do you do it? Why does it feel so impossible to just be okay!”.

My anxiety destroys me, when something goes wrong, it’s fixating, it’s impossible to let go, I feel I have to push, push, push until it’s resolved, but the pushing just makes the situation WORSE. I sit there, and I plead with myself to just walk away. “Chloe, just let go it’ll be okay”. But how, how do you let go when it’s so fixating. Walking away feels physically painful. My obsession for fixing things ended up being a negative turn for my relationship, we’re okay now, but I still have a lot to learn about letting go. My partner needs to be able to walk away, refresh himself, think, be alone. I don’t know how to let him walk away, because I NEED to fix it. Learning that it’s okay just to walk away and let time heal the damage has been one of the hardest things to learn in life, especially coming into adulthood. It’s easy to say, easy to think, but putting it into action. It’s basically impossible. During, what I’ll call my mental breakdown. I sobbed, I cried so physically hard I couldn’t breathe, I called my Mum because in times like those, there is really NO ONE better to talk to. She told me it was okay, she told me it was okay to let it go and tried to rationalise with me. I said to her “I just want to be sedated”. Eventually, like always, she made me feel better.
Looking back, I feel silly but you never realise the toll anxiety takes until you’re sitting right there. It’s evil, it’s a dark cloud.

Maybe you’ve read the children’s book called ‘the red beast’. He’s supposed to be a big angry beast, that comes out when you feel angry, I feel him sometimes but I feel another kind of beast too. I feel anxiety, maybe we’ll call him the big green beast. It’s a sickening feeling, hence the green. I feel him a lot too, I feel he eats me from the inside out, he makes me feel helpless, powerless. He gives me the inability to let go. However, if I let that beast control me. I wouldn’t be here today, my suicide attempt three years ago could have been successful. If I let those thoughts eat me, chew me from the inside out, instead of just letting go I wouldn’t be here. I went from being miserable in high school, to being happy in Uni. I made new friends, I found a new partner, I adopted two crazy hounds and I’m now going into my third year of my degree. That’s not to say I don’t have my fair share of problems, but looking back, I’m doing pretty well now.

A beast inside you is normal, feelings you feel are normal. If you’ve ever watched inside out, you’ll understand why we have to feel everything. However, you’re allowed to overcome your beast. Maybe he’s red or green, but maybe he’s purple, blue or orange. Maybe he’s a she. It’s your beast. As long as you can overcome it, and you can let go when the time is right.

Read my crazy journal entry and interpret it however you like, what best relates to you. Think about your beast, and why your feelings are okay to be felt. Ask yourself, can I let go? If you can’t, that’s okay but I promise you, it will be okay, and it’s okay to let go.