.jpg)
I feel like the last decade of my life has been a study in letting go.
Letting go of the life that I thought was ahead of me, one I thought would be mediocre, in order to step into the unknown and see what I could make of myself that would feel like I had purpose.
In order to do that it was a long road of more letting go and one of the things that struck me most along the way was about identity. How even if it was a part of myself that I wanted to let go of, it was deeply tied to a place in me that identified as that.
Be it Unlovable. Unbeautiful. Invisible. Lost.
These didn’t just feel like stories that I told myself, ones that came from my negative self-image but in fact they were things that felt tied to my identity (and some of them are things I’m presently still working through). I tend to still think of them as the negative stories that I told myself, but sometimes it didn’t feel quite as simple as the word ‘story’ might invite us to think. Sometimes it felt like I needed to let go of a piece of me and sit in the unknown for a while before I knew how to put it back together again without that piece of my identity.
So letting them go left me feeling like if I wasn’t unlovable? Who was I?
If I wasn’t unbeautiful…What was my kind of beautiful?
If I wasn’t invisible…What did my visibility look like and how was that a new part of my identity?
If I wasn’t a lost soul…What felt like being found?
It wasn’t as easy as just letting go of those pieces of my identity and having a new one to replace it with. It felt like unknown.
I know when I was going through this (and in many ways still am), I was in need of a map and for me, taking self-portraits and learning to Be My Own Beloved ended up being that map. One in which I didn’t need to know where I was going. Yet it gave me a place to chart my course back to myself and to start to answer those questions. To look at the woman in the photo, even if at first I didn’t recognize myself in her, knowing that if I kept on taking those self-portraits, some day I would.
It reminds me of the poem:
Barn’s burnt down —
now
I can see the moon.
-Mizuta Masahide
Letting go is big, its vulnerable and I wanted to share this with you in case you’re feeling like letting go will shake at the core of your identity, not just one story that you’d like to let go of.
Even if you feel like you won’t be you without it though you know you want to let it go.
And it will shake at your identity. But it might just mean that there is more of you ahead of you…that you are going to have the blessing to get to meet….
This post is part of the Let it Go Project: a collection of stories leading up to a beautiful releasing ritual, hosted by Sas Petherick on the 30th of January. All the details for this free event are here. And you can take part! Be inspired by other posts in this project, and share what you are ready to let of of on the Let it Go Project Community Page!