opening my heart
reflections on letting go
Hello Beloved Friends,
This newsletter is a little different than the newsletters I normally send, because this one is primarily for my future self, a little bit more like a diary entry , a throwback to the early days of the internet when we all had live journals and xangas.
I am writing this on the eve of my seventh move in seven months
I truly need to go to sleep, but my life is changing fast and it feels important to reflect.
For the past few weeks I have been in the grief of the ending. It is puzzling to me on some level if I think about my feelings, because I have genuinely spent the past few months in survival mode, and for much of that time I was not sure how I would survive.
Getting news that I was hired and that I would be moving to the bay meant clarity on how I would survive, and I feel very excited to live in the bay.
Despite these feelings, I have felt resistance towards my move. I have felt scared, and I have found myself clinging to Atlanta and my lovely community here.
Logically, I am excited about the future, but the reality of getting to that future requires me to say goodbye to the life I am present in.
This time has taught me that beginnings require endings.
Like fertilizer, our endings nurture our beginnings. We don’t get to have one without the other.
It is a gift to feel grief because it means we have felt love. My attachment to my life in Atlanta is a reflection of the love and joy I experience here every day, even during hard times.
Soon, I will be in Oakland, and the new reality I have been nurturing will finally become a living reality. In this moment it is fuzzy and hard to imagine.
To open your heart, you have to let go
Surviving crisis over multiple months forced me to let go of so many different things from my sense of entitlement to the complacency in which I regarded that stability of my home.
At a certain point it clicked for me that my heart is like my hand, and when I open my hand, I let whatever I am holding to let go.
I felt so much anger this year. Things did not go the way I expected, and at first that was difficult, I would feel so much anger around my limited capacity, but I also appreciated the presence and freedom that releasing control has allowed me.
Releasing expectations of myself, managing my own expectations of myself, has provided me with a greater capacity for presence
Letting go can let others in
When I control less, I create more opportunity for collaboration, and the results surprise even me.
When I think about my most controlling self, I think of my inner child who had to manipulate so much to get their needs for connection met. I feel empathy for the ways I felt that I had to orchestrate situations in order to get what I wanted
Now that I have less capacity for orchestration, I am happily surprised to see what can happen when I engage differently.
I feel the living truth of this as I reflect on the move ahead of me. Without me doing or orchestrating anything, so much support has amassed around me. My homies are driving me to the airport, a homie is going to be with me on the plane, a homie of a homie is picking me up from the airport and helping me unpack.
I feel very grateful for the many friends and strangers who have extended care to me during this time.
This captures something real about how grief and gratittude can sit together. The idea that "beginnings require endings" is a reminder I needed—transitions aren't linear, they're layers. I moved across the country a few years back and dunno if I ever properly gave myself space to grieve what I left behind. The way community showed up for u without u orchestrating it is proof that letting go creates the conditions for real support. Wishing you a soft landing in Oakland.