Why can’t I let go?
There comes a point when we realise we're no longer living a life we're consciously creating.
It may be in our work, or our relationships, or our patterns.
But we know that we’re stuck, repeating, not authoring.
That was me for over five years,
Not only was I stuck, but I was unable to leave. Not because of external factors, but because of a deep belief that I didn’t understand in myself.
I knew that my life was not healthy. Nor was it going to bring happiness, only more of the same. But I resisted accepting that. I resisted through the worst sort of evidence. I resisted through two lots of counsellors. I resisted all the way through Covid.
For years I would look in the mirror and ask myself the same question.
Why can’t I let go?
It took me a long time to understand this stage of my resistance, and to see that it wasn’t the weakness I thought it was.
In fact, it was the opposite to weakness. It was a hardened, determined refusal to let go that was holding me in place.
This essay explores why you’re not weak.
You’re not struggling to leave it, or them, you’re struggling to let go of you.
No matter how empty the situation feels, you’ve invested so much into it.
You’re loyal to a version of yourself you don’t want to say goodbye to.
I am not, by any measure, a gardener.
As a craftswoman, I always used to say that, if you garden, it lasts a day. If you make something, it can last a decade, if not a lifetime.
Gardening was something that other people did, and which I admired.
Strange then, that it was a woodland garden which kept me stuck.
The garden arrived in my life via a boat.
An eight-hour round trip to Norfolk to view an old wooden boat for sale that I thought would make a great ‘cabin’. A place to escape the endless toil of life on a family farm, where there was no privacy and no rest.
My partner accepted the trip on the premise that we would only be looking. And the promise of McDonalds on the way.
With a sale price of nearly £5k, that premise was unlikely to be broken.
Our conclusion from the trip was that we needed to find the site first, then choose the odd vessel we would build a getaway from.
To my partner this was evasion of commitment. To me, it was a challenge.
I set out to find the site.
Farms of 200 acres often lose bits of ground. Awkward land, bad drainage, poor access, old fences being replaced by new ones more accessible to modern machinery. I had a 14-acre inaccessible woodland, three old ponds in a scrub of brambles, and two lost corners to consider. I explored them all.
Somehow, over the course of a few generations, a 1/3 acre patch of old woodland and stream, nestled in the awkward juncture of three fields, was lost to nettles. It became the place where dead sheep were thrown to rest. (Their skulls would later feature spectacularly in a Halloween party.) Inaccessible, irritated at my disturbance, and brimming with potential, I chose this one lost corner.
My finding the site didn’t thrill my partner, who had been hoping the search would dull my enthusiasm. When I asked for some help, he gave me two old planks of wood to make a makeshift bridge across the stream that formed one boundary, and nicknamed it the Bermuda triangle, because I seemed to keep getting lost in there on Saturday mornings.
I waged war on the nettles so repeatedly that I became impervious to their bite. I found saplings from other patches of woodland on the farm and transported them. Rescued two flowering cherry trees abandoned in pots. Was given twenty laurel hedge trees by a local fencing firm when they ripped them out to replace with fencing. I dug them into the tough root-riddled ground in a thick downpour. Labouring on my own for over four hours, spending the next two weeks ill with a cold.
I cleared paths to give access and break down the magnitude of the job. Crafted elderflower trees into a tunnel walk. Discovered a small pond at the top and, behind it, a lightning struck willow tree that had folded in half and carried on growing. I built the kids an adventure walkway along its back. Planted a willow hut in its shade.
As I cleared the paths and gathered stones, I began to make a firepit. It was ten feet across. Weekly, I’d fill it with the cleared branches of my labours.
In time, others began to notice. One summer holiday when friends visited, they helped me erect a makeshift yurt. Another friend was throwing out their children’s climbing tower; it became a lookout at the top of the wood. A contractor dug up some old fossil stones on a site; they lined the access to the stream. The convergence of two trees was woven into a shelter with stick walls; it became the honorific home of all the green sheep skulls. It became a ritual for visiting children to choose their favourite and take them home to their own garden as tealight holders, much to the horror of many mums.
Week after week, every chance I had, I would traipse down to the play wood, and work away by myself. Week after week, I would leave the house and all that was wrong in it, take my troubles with me and vent them on the nettles. I would sting myself back into loving my life, even as I knew it was falling apart.
If I could conquer a patch of ground, bring it back to beauty, transplant hope and saplings, knit family and friends together round the fireplace, I could conquer anything.
We celebrated our daughter’s sixth birthday there, two years after I began the work. The Halloween trail began at the farmhouse and ended at the wood. When I made my partner and his workman dig a pet cemetery on the way, complete with animal skeletons crawling from their graves, they returned white-faced and silent. An old chainsaw pinned a scarecrow to the trunk of a tree with a gaping ‘mouth’. My friend set up camp as a witch in the skull cave. An entire class of children will never forget that night. Hopefully in a good way!
As the years passed, I dragged more people in to help me. I levelled a patch of ground next to the top pond, with the help of the farm workman. We almost lost the tractor (worth thousands) in the soft ground, barely rescued it and swore secrecy to never tell my partner/his boss. A plumber friend set up a fully connected sink in a kitchen built under a shelter for my birthday party one year.
I built a table that was 16 feet long from reclaimed boards ripped from the side of an old barn. I mowed the paths, weeded the ground, nursed the trees, tended the shelters.
I laboured at that patch of forgotten ground for 6 years.
It wasn’t a garden of course.
It was a project of faith and resurrection.
No matter how messed up the home front, my woodland garden gave me hope.
That garden held me together through the physical collapse brought on by IVF, through my hysterectomy, through my depression, through the unravelling of broken promises and wounded love.
Every time I felt like I couldn’t go on, I would go to the garden and know I couldn’t leave. I’d worked so hard, I’d invested so much. I’d made something rare and precious from land that had been nothing to no one.
I’d sit at the empty firepit and remember the parties, and the labour of love, and see all the ideas I still had, and delight in the growth of the new trees.
How could I leave, and not know how it all grew over the years?
When the reality that my relationship was over finally hit, the hardest thing of all was letting go of the garden.
Not the twelve years together, nor the lifestyle, nor the home, nor the family unit.
Alongside my daughter, it was the only true thing that I had created all of my own in the time I gave to that place, that person, that life.
I knew I wouldn’t lose my daughter. But the wood, that was letting go of the best part of me in that time there.
The last time I walked in the wood was the week before I moved out of the family home. Though I would still be living on the farm, I was not allowed access to any of it. I had the right to walk the dog through two fields close to my allocated residence. The woodland was buried in the heart of the farm.
I had to say goodbye to it.
It wasn’t the goodbye I thought it was.
As I followed each curving path, as I counted each little detail, the seating areas, the shelters, the planting, I realised I was saying goodbye to the part of myself that had never given up hoping.
The part of me that had invested in building and tending, even when the relationship was crumbling and breaking.
I recalled every ‘mad Saturday’ that I’d come to get away and worked the anger and frustration out of my system.
I knew the birthsite of every tree, where the sapling had been found, when I had transplanted it.
I twisted the branches of the elderflower tunnel together one last time and marvelled at the height of the two flowering cherry trees. They were in glorious bloom as I said farewell.
I thought that the pain of letting go was the pain of realising how much of myself I had invested into this place. How much of myself I was going to have to leave behind.
The pain of realising how much that investment had kept me in a relationship that was desperately unhappy and unhealthy for so long.
But there was something else I hadn’t understood until that final walk.
And it was a grief I was unprepared for.
Yes, when we struggle to change a pattern or leave a situation that we know is no longer working for us, we are struggling to let go of the version of ourselves that needed that pattern to survive.
The version that invested, again and again and again.
But, while it may feel like it’s the past version of you that you are struggling to release, it’s actually the future version of you that you have been investing in.
If you let go, if you leave, or stop, or change the pattern, you have to let go of the outcome you have been hoping for.
It wasn’t the clearing, or the planting, or the mowing, or the parties, or the safe space that I’d created which was truly mine, that I had to let go of.
It was the belief that I would see those baby trees grow with my own eyes.
I had planted my roots just as surely, with a vision of what my life would look like.
A vision I would never now see.
Making the decision or changing the pattern is almost impossible without realising first how much is still invested.
You might berate yourself for months or years for not taking the first step. Without ever realising how heavily weighted that first step is: you’re resisting the grief that is inevitable.
You aren’t struggling to let go of the past.
You’re clinging to the last hope for the future you invested in.
It’s not weakness, it’s a refusal to grieve.
Even though the investment is so deep, and the release is so hard, part of you already knows that future is empty.
Part of you knows that the balance sheet is wrong. That you’ve already begun to understand what must change. You’ll hear those confusing whispers of what you might, could, or should do. The ideas that rise at strange times and ask you to change something.
And in this confusion, you see only the huge scale of starting again. Of working toward a different outcome. A level of enterprise that feels like you can only start from scratch. A baseline that you know, from your existing experience, just how much work and commitment and time and energy you’ll need to rebuild.
You can see the options. You can see the cost. And you already have what is familiar, even if you know its not working.
You don’t yet truly know what you want. But you absolutely know what you’ve already invested.
This is why you can’t let go.
Where next?
The Rewrite Philosophy
This essay explores Rewrite Belief 3: We protect identities we’ve invested in.
You might also be interested in Rewrite Belief 2: We assume identities written before we could write our own, where I explore why we may be feeling uncomfortable with the life we have.
From the Rewrite Bookshelf
The book I’d hand you immediately after finishing this essay is A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens.
It’s not often I’ll recommend a classic book, as all too often they can be chewy to digest. However, when it comes to looking at the challenge of escaping the identities we’ve invested in, I know no book that will hold you as enthralled and capture the sense of heartbreak that comes from realising we have to let go of all we are to become all we may yet be. Be warned: this book may never leave your reading heart. And, if you read it a long while ago, and are now in the midlife trenches, go back and read it again. Also, yes it’s Dickens, but it’s the least Dickensian of Dickens, if you know what I mean.
Rewrite Today
Meet me on the edge of change in my fortnightly free newsletter. In it, you’ll experience how I use journaling to deepen self-knowing and clarify life challenges.