LET IT GO!

Welcome back to SOLO AT SIXTY!

Time to LET IT GO!

Is there anyone on this planet who did not see the movie “FROZEN”? Remember the YouTube video of the mother in NC who threatened to kill the Frozen characters after listening to her child sing “LET IT GO” for 3 solid snow days? What good advice. NO, not killing the characters, but maybe Elsa was onto something: “LET IT GO”!

If you are in a relationship, you communicate with your partner daily – texting, emailing, calling, and just talking. Maybe it’s about how your day is going, how late you are working, what’s for dinner, what Hallmark movie you are going to watch that night (ok, maybe not that). Now, imagine you can no longer talk to, text, email, or call your partner anymore. Cord cut. Severed. Done. That was one of the hardest parts of my breakup because we texted, emailed, called and just talked so many times during the day. Every day. And in one day, there was just silence…no texting, no emailing, no calling, no talking…I was SOLO.

Many times this past year something funny would happen, or something that was applicable to “us”, and my first reaction was to pick up the phone and make a call. My sister became a grandmother to sweet baby Jack; our dear college friends became grandparents; Princess Leia died (we watched all the Star Wars Movies together); and the topper – I won the Clemmons Courier College Football Bowl Contest! What is the Clemmons Courier you ask? Well… it’s a weekly, world renown local paper (the size of a hefty church bulletin) from our home town of Clemmons, NC. And the most popular part of the paper in the fall and winter is the contest to guess the winners of that week’s football or basketball games, which I religiously enter each week. Of course, I always pick UNC and the Panthers to win, but if I don’t know the records of the other teams listed, I make my picks based on team name, mascot, uniform color, or if I know someone who went to that school or lived in that city. But it works! (Sometimes.)

Not willing to give up my North Carolina roots when we moved to VA, I continued my subscription to the Courier, even though it cost $5 more per year to get it out of state. The problem? Contest entries were due by 5:00pm on Friday afternoon, and my copy wasn’t even in my mailbox until a week later. Now remember, this was 1997, long before everything was at your fingertips on the internet, so I emailed the Contest Director asking when the Courier would go online so I could enter the contest. Bless his heart if he did not begin emailing me a copy of the contest every Thursday! I even made the headlines the next week: “Lovely Leslie of Charlottesville, VA cannot enter the Contest” (what was I saying about needing to let things go??). So I was back in the contest and the pressure was on. And believe it or not, I have won. Three times! My most recent win was this year’s College Football Bowl Contest, and I won $20 (uh-oh, I forgot to report that on my taxes!). But more importantly, I, “Lovely Leslie” won the coveted CAP of CAPS! And I wanted to share this with my best friend… only, I didn’t have that best friend anymore. So I called my kids and my sisters, bragged about it to my brother-in-law (another contest regular), emailed my friends, and my “best friend” never even knew. He would have gotten a real kick of out that.

Made the headline again!

Notice the Cap of Caps!

“The truth about your heart. Your heart will fix itself. It’s your mind you need to worry about. Your mind where you locked the memories, your mind where you have kept pieces of the ones that hurt you, that still cut through you like shards of glass. Your mind will keep you up at night, make you cry, destroy you over and over again. You need to convince your mind that it has to let go because your heart already knows how to heal.” — Nikita Gill

Moving on does not mean you forget what has happened… that will never be the case. It means you refuse to continue letting the hurt, anger, bitterness, and embarrassment control your life. It means you have found your strength. Trust me, there are still minutes, hours, days that I experience that horrible hurt again – the shards of glass cutting through my heart. Seems when I find myself in a really good place, something happens – I learn something, I see something, I hear something – and I am back in that hurtful place again. But I now know that I can claw my way back up. And I can LET IT GO!

How, do you ask? Forgiveness. I read somewhere: “I never knew how strong I was until I had to forgive someone who wasn’t sorry and accept an apology I never received.” So true! My decision to forgive was NOT for anyone but ME. And it took me a L O N G time to reach this point. Forgiving did not change the past – that will always remain. What it did was free ME, allowing ME to heal, to put the hurt, anger and bitterness that caused me so much pain in a box that I then buried. It allowed me to LET IT GO. Let go of the past and the past will let go of you.

“I’ve learned a lot this year. I learned that things don’t always turn out the way you planned, or the way you think they should. I learned that there are things that go wrong that don’t always get fixed or put back together the way they were before. I learned that some broken things stay broken, and I learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.”  (Jennifer Weiner – though I could have written this one!)

They say letting go means carrying a permanent scar, not a permanent wound.  I am scarred but no longer wounded, because I LET IT GO!

So if you find yourself in this position (and I pray you never do), remember, it is best to forgive – and if the person who hurt you has not asked for forgiveness – do it for YOU. This transfers the burden to them. Because you have LET IT GO!

Slam that door!  See you next Wednesday!

Best,

Leslie