Is the Fear Worth the Reward When We Say Goodbye to Parts of Ourselves?

My first thought when I think about saying goodbye is the people that have departed my life for many reasons over the years. My second thought is for the aspects of myself I’ve had to say goodbye to, namely the images I’ve created, identities I’ve formed, and then peeled off as they grew too tight and began to suffocate.

Now, I’m no Mr. Ripley so this isn’t a tale of manipulation and mystery but then again perhaps it is.

We can only be known by how much of ourselves we expose to the gaze of others. What we say, how we act, the choices we make. All of these things shape how we are seen, but what of the images we build in our own minds about who and what we are. Who are we manipulating then if not ourselves?

I can do this.

I can’t do that.

I’m really good at…

I’m useless at…

All stories we write and then hold to be fact. Some of them help us, protect us, and put us into neat little boxes which feel safe and very comfortable. Others make that box very small with no space to stretch and grow.

Internal shifts can be subtle or cataclysmic, but importantly they can be chosen.

Just as we learn some random new thing about the world each day, we can if we’re willing to look, learn something new about ourselves, and this self-reflection leads to changes. In the way think and process, and in the way we see ourselves.

Cerebrally we know that death is just a part of the never-ending cycle, a necessary process that creates space for something new to be born, but we all resist. We hold on tightly to everything we love with both hands, and we refuse to let go of the things we don’t particularly like, but we are used to just because it is familiar and feels safer to do so.

What do you need to let die?

That might sound dramatic but at some point it has to come down to that, because if you’re not willing to let go of the old things you are carrying how will you ever have space in your life for something new?

List all the aspects of your identity that you can think of. It’s a bit like a gratitude practice when you’re in a bad mood… you start not being able to think of much but once you get going you feel like you’ll never stop.

Once you’re done and you read back over them, how many do you actively want to be? How many do you truly identify with? How many were created because you felt they were necessary to meet the needs of other people?

Looking in the mirror is scary and asking these kinds of questions can be extremely uncomfortable, but they are also the keys to unlocking a life that feels more alive and true. A life you don’t need to escape from.

At the beginning of Covid, I lost one of my social media accounts. It was one I had had for years. My primary means of communicating with a huge section of the people in my life and my way of being visible in the world. For a moment I felt completely lost, how would people find me, know me? But then came the dawning realisation that with the wiping out of that history I could start afresh and consciously chose the identity I created. I could shape how I would be known from there on out. No longer did I have to be the organiser, the one people should come to if they wanted x, y, or z. I could leave behind all the groups and friends I had collected without meaning too. It was liberating.

I was being offered a chance to say goodbye to aspects of myself that I had once needed and that benefited me, but in letting go of them, I was accepting the chance to become something new.

In small steps and with shifts so subtle that no one around you even realises you can stretch the box into whatever shape that fits you today. Will you choose to?