Learning To Let Go
“I’m a planner,” I say. The voice leaving my lips sounds more like a resolution than a declaration of fact. All my life I’ve worked to be the type of person who has it all together, checked the little boxes, walked forward with her head high. I’ve always taken pride in knowing, without a doubt, where I was going. I always, always had a plan.
Until I didn’t.
Until I realized the man I thought I’d spent forever with wasn’t actually the one. Until I realized I wanted nothing but the ocean salt on my skin, over the humid air of the Midwest. Until I got in a car and drove across the country with dreams like a map laid out in front of me.
Until I stopped having a plan.
And each time I did, destiny wrote the story I’d been trying so hard to erase, and rewrite, and recreate, the smudge marks from my own mistakes bleeding through the page.
Each time I let go and let the universe leave her loopy handwriting across my chapters, everything fell into place.
I hold the phone to my ear as I absentmindedly trace the letters of my calendar. The pages are open, notes jotted down in the margins. I have a schedule, I have dates and commitments and obligations laid out in different colors across the June and July boxes. I have the days figured out, the weeks coordinated.
“I’m a planner,” I repeat, my voice falling softer. My best friend, on the other line, shifts position. I hear the brush of her hair against the receiver and I imagine her nodding, imagine her blue eyes staring into mine as I say words more to myself than to her.
Perhaps striving to be a planner leaves me rooted in place. Perhaps all the value I put into planning is not so much the answer, as it is a decoy from the truth. And perhaps what the truth has shown me, time and time again, is that in the moments I’ve let go and stopped trying to have all the answers — the answers came.
They came in the form of a one-bedroom apartment six blocks from the beach. They came in a job that resonated so deeply with my heart. They came in a quiet little bar on a Tuesday night, standing in a black Metallica shirt with a heart as wide as the moon.
