I'm Letting It Go
It turns out that “letting it go” feels a lot like deciding not to be ticklish—triumphant, powerful, self-satisfied.
Context
When I was a kid, I decided not to be ticklish.
I used to tell people this as a matter of fact, but enough side eye over the years has cowed me a little. Now I tell the story like it’s equal parts deadpan joke and sacred myth. “I decided not to be ticklish,” I say, “and then I wasn’t.” There’s a clear period at the end of the sentence and just the barest hint of a smile on my face and it’s up to whoever’s listening to decide if they believe me, or if they think I believe myself.
Just between us, here’s the real story: I don’t remember who the tickler was, but I do remember feeling powerless. I remember not wanting to feel that way. Almost immediately I remember thinking “I won’t be ticklish anymore.” And then I wasn’t. I’m not kidding. That’s how it felt. There was more tickling, and I felt only the barest hint of involuntary squirm. Then, a sense of thrill. I had done it! Suddenly I was a being of immense power. Awesome, in the most literal sense of the word.1
It turns out that “letting it go” feels a lot like deciding not to be ticklish—triumphant, powerful, self-satisfied.
Until recently I thought that “letting it go” would feel peaceful. I imagined people who let things go as maybe angels, somehow floating above the rest of us, being zen or whatever. I thought basically that for those people a shitty thing would happen and instead of feeling pissed, a kind of beatific calm would settle around them. Smiling patiently, they’d gently pat the feeling on the head and send it on its way. This was my best guess, anyway. I didn’t know for sure; I’d never really done it myself. Truthfully, until recently what held the most appeal about letting things go was the adage “the best revenge is indifference,” which sort of undermines the whole exercise.
So not a letter-goer, in general. And then, the other day,2 a friend said something to me that I experienced as extremely condescending3 and it drove me absolutely crazy. For hours. I walked around all afternoon with a shouty internal monologue. “HOW DARE THEY IMPLY?! WHEN I AM CLEARLY THE TOGETHER ONE!!” I silently screamed. I was fully unhinged, in response to a fairly innocuous statement, with no sense of irony about it whatsoever. I went to bed that night stewing about it, and the stew was made of indignation, anxiety,4 and probably more than a little shame. I woke up having forgotten it, and then I remembered it again and I thought “Hey! Yeah! That thing was bullshit!”
Does it sound exhausting? It was. Does it sound super not worth the energy I was expending? Also correct. But “let it go”? Not a strategy that typically occurs to me. Don’t get me wrong. I understand why it’s a good idea. Firstly, stewing sucks. It’s unpleasant. In this weather, it takes away from sitting blissfully in the sunshine, caressed by a temperate breeze. Also, stewing doesn’t make anything better. The stew is in fact called Resentment and it harms relationships. It gives everyone food poisoning, basically.5 Also also, the aforementioned inner monologue is deeply unflattering. It is itself condescending. It is petty. It smacks of supremacy, which we are very famously Working To Dismantle in All Its Forms. I don’t want to be a person who needs to make themself feel better by feeling better than someone else.
I have lots of tools to help me not be that person, all of which involve digging in.
I journal about it, asking questions like “why do I feel this way?”, “when is the first time I can remember feeling this way?”, and “what is this feeling trying to protect?” I do altar work, surrender to Spirit, pull tarot cards to tell me how to respond to this feeling and the person triggering it. Or I imagine a child version of myself and speak to her soothingly, saying all the things she needed to hear— I speak to myself at 16, when she was not getting good grades and was made to feel stupid and recalcitrant but was in fact very smart, pretty traumatized, and just honestly very busy managing that.
All of these responses are good. They support my immediate relief and also my ongoing healing. But what they’re not is quick or easy. They take real time and rigor and a lot of emotional energy. And I am tired. So the other day, when I felt condescended to and was still thinking about it 18 hours later, at the dawn (ish) of a brand new day that I wanted to spend, ideally, frolicking in a meadow full of spring flowers… it occurred to me to consider just letting it go.
And then, dear reader, I let it go. And I have to say, I feel extremely smug about it.
Stuff
This song is the opposite of letting it go, but it’s catchy as hell. Her new album is also very nice.
This song is like a singing prayer for release. It regularly makes me cry.
Last week I saw a friend in the New York Neo-Futurists’ show and it was just beyond excellent. They do the show every Friday and Saturday night, and I will be going back at my earliest convenience. And just for funsies, here’s the This American Life episode inspired by their format.
This week I’m seeing a play my dear friend Caitlin is directing. It’s “not about Amazon, not about Jeff Bezos and certainly not about Elon Musk.” It’ll be weird, and knowing Caitlin it’ll also be excellent. The run is short so snag tickets while you can; I already can’t wait to talk about it with you.
awesome: adjective. extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear. Ex. "the awesome power of the atomic bomb" Similar: breathtaking, astounding, astonishing
To be clear, for me the phrase “the other day” means “on a day, the exact location in time of which I do not recall… possibly in the last 2-3 years?”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our experience of something as “condescending” is about our relationship(s) to supremacy, so stay tuned for that incomprehensible newsletter.
Anxiety is like the salt of emotional stews. It makes all the other feelings flavors really zing.
Yeah, I see that I stretched the metaphor too far. We’ll just all have to live with it.