Letting Go Even When It Hurts

I’ve been having a difficult time lately, and then having COVID on top of everything else has made it even harder.

Recently, I lost a family member.

There were things I wish I could have said to him before he passed. We weren’t expecting him to leave this earth so soon. I think that loss made me realize just how much I have left unsaid in my life and how much pain I have carried quietly for decades.

So I decided to reach out to his mother.

That wasn’t easy.

I knew there was a good chance I wouldn’t get a response.

I didn’t.

But knowing I probably wouldn’t get one didn’t mean I didn’t want one.

Of course I wanted one.

Some part of me still wanted to know that maybe I mattered enough for my words to be acknowledged.

I think that is one of the hardest things about feeling like the black sheep or the scapegoat in a family.

For a long time, I have felt like I may have been a little of both.

For years, my mother would tell me hurtful things family members supposedly said about me.

Sometimes I wonder if they knew she would come back and tell me.

Sometimes I wonder if the things I was told were repeated exactly the way they were said.

I may never know every detail of those conversations.

But I do know my mother could not have come up with those things on her own.

Those words had to come from somewhere.

What I don’t know is the context they were said in, whether anything changed along the way, or whether the people saying them knew they would eventually get back to me.

What I do know is that there always seemed to be something new.

Different comments.

Different criticisms.

Different things I was being told someone had said about me.

And every new thing hurt.

This is also a big part of why being around my mother is so difficult for me.

She wonders why I can’t just forgive them and move on. But how was I supposed to heal when there always seemed to be another hurtful thing being brought to me?

I tried to make it stop.

I told her over and over, Please quit telling me what they say about me. I don’t want to hear it.

I even told her, Do you not understand that it is none of my business what people say about me?

If someone has something to say about me and they don’t say it to me, I don’t need to know.

If someone feels like they have to repeat it, tell someone else.

Please don’t bring it to me.

But she kept doing it.

When this first started happening, I became extremely upset. I remember trying desperately to make her understand how much it was hurting me.

I kept asking her:

Why are you telling me this? Why are you doing this to me?

At one point, I became so overwhelmed and angry that I got on top of her and shook her.

That was wrong.

I know it was wrong, and I never did it again.

But I remember feeling like I had tried words. I had asked her to stop. I had told her I was hurting. And I felt like none of it mattered.

My mother has been the one person who can bring me to an emotional place I don’t recognize in myself.

That is one of the reasons I know I have to have distance.

It is not because I don’t love her.

I do love her.

But love does not mean I can keep putting myself in a situation that hurts me.

For years, she has brought hurtful things back to me, and then she wonders why I struggle to have a relationship with her.

This is why.

I have heard enough.

My mother even told me they wouldn’t let her say anything negative about my brother and that they didn’t talk about him that way.

So naturally, one question has stayed with me:

Why was it always me?

Why did my name keep coming up?

Why did there always seem to be another hurtful thing to say about me?

Sometimes it honestly felt like they were trying to find something new. Almost like it had become some kind of game.

I don’t know if that was actually their intention. I wasn’t there for those conversations.

But that is how it felt from where I stood.

It is incredibly hard when you feel like you are standing alone on one side while the rest of your family is standing together on the other.

I felt alone.

I felt outnumbered.

And I felt like I was constantly hearing about conversations where I was being discussed but wasn’t there to defend myself or explain my side.

Sometimes I think I would have rather someone called me and said whatever they had to say directly to my face.

At least then I would have known exactly what was said, who said it, and why.

One of the things that has stayed with me the most happened when I lost my baby.

Even in the middle of that grief, hurtful words still found their way back to me.

A “friend” came to me and told me that some family members were questioning why I was having a funeral for my baby.

My uncle had also given me a burial plot for my baby, and I was told that some people in the family didn’t like that either.

I was grieving my child.

I was already trying to survive one of the greatest losses of my life, and somehow I was still hearing what other people supposedly thought about my baby’s funeral and burial.

I didn’t need to hear any of it.

Those things have stayed with me all these years, and they are part of why funerals involving that side of my family are so difficult for me now.

They take me back to a time when I should have simply been allowed to grieve my baby.

That is what I mean when I say these things piled up.

It wasn’t one comment or one argument.

It was years of different hurtful things being brought back to me, even during some of the hardest moments of my life.

Eventually, I began to feel like I was blamed for everything.

When my cousin had cancer, I was told I wasn’t there for her.

That hurt because I had reached out to her. I went to see her. I asked her if there was anything I could do and told her to call me because I lived right down the road.

She never reached out.

I couldn’t force myself into her life.

How can I be there for someone who doesn’t want me to be there?

There were also complicated circumstances between us that made the relationship difficult. I don’t feel the need to explain all of those details anymore.

What matters is that I did care.

Whatever complications existed between us did not mean I wanted anything bad to happen to her or that I didn’t hurt for what she was going through.

That is something I wish people understood about me.

I can be hurt by someone and still care about what happens to them.

I can feel rejected and still have compassion.

I can have complicated feelings and still have a heart.

And maybe that is part of why all of this has been so difficult to let go.

I have carried these questions for decades.

Why did they talk about me?

Why did my mother feel the need to repeat it?

Why did I always feel like I was the one being blamed?

I may never have all the answers.

But after losing someone unexpectedly, something inside me couldn’t keep holding everything in anymore.

So I reached out.

I wasn’t ugly.

I wasn’t trying to attack anyone.

The message came from a place of tremendous pain.

It came from a heart that had been carrying things for far too long.

And I know I needed to send it.

I know I needed to get those feelings off my heart.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be days when I question it.

There probably will be.

I may wonder how it was received or worry that my words were taken differently from how I intended them.

I hope they weren’t.

But I know what was in my heart when I sent them.

I wasn’t trying to cause more hurt.

I was trying to release some of mine.

I have had so many things happen in my life, and I have carried so much for so long.

I need to heal from some of it.

And I believe getting this off my heart is part of that healing.

The pain isn’t going to disappear overnight.

But I believe it will ease with time.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life carrying decades-old words and wounds.

And I don’t want to hear another hurtful thing someone supposedly said about me.

I don’t need to know.

It is none of my business.

If someone wants me to know something, they can tell me themselves.

I cannot change what anyone thinks of me.

I cannot make someone respond to me.

I cannot make someone care about me.

And I cannot go backward and change what happened.

What I can do is decide what I carry forward.

I reached out once.

I said what I needed to say.

I will not reach out again.

Not because I regret reaching out.

I don’t.

I needed to say it.

But now I need to let it rest.

Part of healing for me is refusing to hear another hurtful thing and refusing to keep carrying all the old ones.

Maybe letting go isn’t saying, It was okay.

Maybe letting go is saying, It hurt me, it mattered, and I don’t want to carry it anymore.

I know there will be hard days.

I know there will be days when my mind goes back over everything.

But I also know this:

I needed to get it off my heart.

I know why I sent it.

I know what my intentions were.

And I know I need to heal.

I have carried enough.

Now I want to learn how to put some of it down.