Letting Go

 Letting go

One of the hardest lessons in life is not learning how to hold on.

It is learning when to let go.

We cling not because holding feels good, but because letting go feels like death to the part of us that once survived by holding tightly.

Guilt, anger, love, loss, betrayal; none of these stay because we enjoy them. They stay because they once meant something. They were proof that we cared, tried, hoped, or belonged.

Letting go is not an act of forgetting. It is an act of acceptance.

Acceptance that what happened cannot be undone.
Acceptance that some chapters end without closure.
Acceptance that change will hurt, whether you resist it or not.

This is why change feels so exhausting.
You are fighting on two fronts.

One part of you wants relief, peace, movement.

Another part wants familiarity, identity, and the illusion of control.

So you fight to hang on
and you fight to let go.

We rarely talk about how unfair this internal war feels.

You may know logically that something is over ; a relationship, a version of yourself, a dream, a phase of life.

Yet emotionally, your nervous system hasn’t caught up. The body still reacts. The mind still revisits. The heart still negotiates.

That doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.

Letting go doesn’t happen in one brave moment. It happens in small, repeated surrenders.

Each time you choose not to replay the same memory.
Each time you stop explaining your pain to people who won’t understand.
Each time you allow grief without turning it into self-punishment.
Each time you say, “This hurts, but I don’t need to bleed forever.”

What we call “holding on” is often fear dressed up as loyalty.

What we call “letting go” is often courage we don’t yet trust.

You are not betraying your past by moving forward.
You are honouring it by refusing to stay trapped inside it.

Some things don’t need to be carried for life to be meaningful.
Some wounds don’t need to define your identity.

Letting go doesn’t mean you stop caring.
It means you stop suffering on purpose.

And that may be the bravest thing you ever do.

Nandini Mithun ✍️