Letting Go: A Short List To Happy

From Someone Who Hangs On

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

I’ve never been very good at letting go of things.

Well, things, yes, but emotions? No, not so much. I’ve always been okay with not holding on to actual, physical stuff, but my feelings are another element entirely. Even as I have embraced Marie Kondo in the tangible, I’ve harbored longtime clutching to some unhealthy mindsets.

So I decided to take the Swedish Art of Death Cleaning to my mental state of being.

Here are the things I have decided to release:

Perfection.

Many times in my life, I have chastised myself when I fall short of exactness. I have had hundreds of mental conversations where I am the bad guy because my grades, my hair, my body, my marriage — you name it — are imperfect. So finally, at fifty, I am letting go of the notion that I am, or can ever be, one hundred percent of anything.

Control. Of other people.

I’ve often become frustrated because someone else — my kids, my colleagues, my staff, my ex-husband — didn’t do things the way they were “supposed to.” So it’s time for me to recognize that they were perhaps doing things the way they meant to. That way may or may not have been a good way or a right way or a wrong way, but it was their way…