MATH

This post includes content about food restriction and eating, workaholism, grief, and codependency. please engage mindfully, and respect your own journey and boundaries with these topics.

Today I’m thinking about what I want to let go of, what I’m setting down in order to make space for whatever is coming next.

In the work of becoming unstuck, or un-burned out, sometimes letting go is the only way forward.

This has been one of the hardest parts of the work of moving forward. Letting go is a process of unlearning really old, deep patterns and ways of being. Some of those ways of being were so enmeshed with my identity that letting them go set off fears of losing parts of myself.

But if the opposite of being stuck is being free, then it’s time to throw off the sandbags and clip the strings and let it all fall away.

Sometimes I think of this as the law of addition and subtraction. In order to make space for new ways of being, you can either add or subtract. But there’s a catch: if you add something in, it has to intentionally crowd out something you’re ready to move away from – it has to replace the old way of doing or being. And if you subtract, you have to subtract something that will give you more space for yourself – subtraction is not the same as deprivation. (You is me, in this scenario. This is a rule I created for myself.)

Letting go of my need to deprive myself of food, water, and rest was where the law of addition and subtraction started for me. A nutrition coach taught me about crowding out: a practice of eating food that would help me feel full every time I felt hungry, using satisfying food to crowd out the food that was turning my blood sugar, and therefore my moods and cravings, into a daily roller coaster. Crowding out is a practice of adding in more satisfaction and pleasure and contentment in order to allow the release of the old ways of starvation.

And it was the realization that most of my personal methods of survival included some form of deprivation that helped me realize that I needed to be careful with subtraction. I could easily subtract food until there was nothing I could eat at all, actually starving myself or finding ways to eliminate most foods by labeling them as bad. I could subtract hours of sleep and relaxing so that I barely did anything besides work and deprive myself of fun. I could subtract having any of my own needs if I simply put all of my energy and worth into meeting everyone else’s needs.

In order for subtraction to be restorative and nourishing, the boundary had to be that I can only subtract things that pull me away from myself or that are taking up too much space in my life. Subtraction is letting go of the need to make myself literally smaller, less visible, or quieter, so that I can make space to be more myself. It’s letting go of my need to be superhuman and less than human at the same time, of trying to do the impossible, so that I can feel my edges and learn to accept what it feels like to be just a human who has needs and wants and desires.

Letting go is a process and it isn’t one that happens overnight. It takes time to change your commitments to yourself. Sometimes, there’s grief in moving away from the old patterns, even the harmful ones, or the people that those patterns connected you to. I wish my past self could know that the smallest progress is the most important kind of progress. And I’m grateful, so grateful, for the hands that reached out to help me find the path again every time I lost the way. 

May we all reach the place where letting old patterns go no longer feels like prying them from the desperate grasp of a tightly closed fist. May we find the place where it feels like opening a hand to let a breeze blow the ashes of the old ways from an open palm into the air, where we can watch them float away like dust on the wind. And then continue taking the steps on our path toward becoming more ourselves.