The Art of Letting Go: Returning to the Self That Waited for Me

In my quite work of healing, I’ve discovered that I am both the wound and the healer. The next step is not in finding more love outside of me, but in releasing everyone I once made responsible for my deepest pain. For my breathe when I couldn't catch it, my heartbeat when it skipped, my peace when it was interrupted. I needed the Love for me to be stronger than the pain I was feeling.

This morning I was faced with standing in my truth on a whole other level, I mean facing my full truth — and it hurt me to my core. Not the surface kind of hurt that fades with time, but the deep ache that comes when you finally meet yourself face to face.

Over the past year, I have peeled back so many layers causing me to be a bit raw, dang it. I know now that the more you breathe in and allow the air to go further than the time before you will pull up the junk that is stuck. This is that "lump in your throat" you feel and then we quickly gain our composure and allow it to run back inside, and hide. Well "I learned today" as I caught that lump and faced it head on. I saw what was hidden, the parts of me that needed my love and attention the most.

I heard and felt my soul cry out, there’s nowhere left to run Angie, its time, it's time. The weight of this responsibility to answer the call of my soul was like a strong wind pushing against a fragile branch. My soul said to me You are responsible for you — your peace, your choices, your healing, your happiness.

It’s not easy to awaken to the truth, it is easier to point outward — to the people who hurt us, the circumstances that shaped us, the patterns we didn’t choose. But real healing asks more of us.

It asks us to stop waiting for someone to make it right and to start making it right ourselves all of it. Then we have to sit in the discomfort of our own becoming. I found myself downstairs in my basement alone wrapped in a blanket feeling all the pain.

There’s a pain that comes with awakening — not because we’re broken, but because we’re shedding everything that kept us small. Shedding that happens even when you are already raw. When you finally see yourself naked, bare to the bone, Oh you can’t unsee that. You can’t go back to pretending, performing, or trying to people please.

You realize that the only one who can truly save you is the version of yourself you’ve been afraid to meet —the one who tells the truth, sets the boundary, speaks the need, chooses peace. Trust me I am very familiar with this part of me because I am good at telling other the truth, letting other know what they need and making choices for other to have peace, but now I need to do it for me, Hold Up.

And when you allow her your deepest soul to choose for you, you now are willing to lose illusions, attachments, comfort zones to gain freedom.

Step one on this path is the hardest one yet —to release the people I’ve held hostage, even if they never knew they were being held.

These are the people I’ve kept close, my excuses — the ones I used to avoid facing, my real pain. The stories I told myself about why I couldn’t grow, couldn’t move on, couldn’t change.

Today, I release them. Not out of anger, not out of bitterness — but out of truth.

Because it’s time to stand here, alone if I must, with the weight of my own heart and the lump in my throat. My soul cried out I am no longer masking. I will stop hiding from how I truly feel I will feel everything in the moment and deal with it. The heaviness, the honesty, the humanity of it all.

I want to meet this version of me —the one who stands without blame or rescue, the one who knows that her breath is her own, and that her heartbeat is proof she’s still here — for herself.

I need to say it again, Today, I am both hurting and healing. Both breaking open and rebuilding. Both grieving and grateful.

Because this pain — this deep ache in my soul — is evidence that I am alive, awake, and finally taking responsibility for the life I’m meant to live.

This is what standing in truth feels like: It’s not always pretty it’s not always peaceful. But it is always sacred.

“When I stopped waiting for someone to rescue me, I found the part of me that had been waiting to rise. And when I released those I had held hostage calling them my pain, I finally set myself free.”