letting go.

i have had to let a lot of things go lately. and i'm not good at that.

you're talking about the girl that still has a notebook from kindergarten and her first teddy bear (well really the second one since i lost the first one in the mall when i was little).

first i let go of the mission i felt so passionate about. except i didn't really let go of that, i just traded it in for a new one and serve the old one as a volunteer. and i didn't let go of the 5K i panned for habitat either.

then i let go of john when he moved back to indiana. that one is still hard. when you are with someone for a long time it takes a little while to stop looking back. so many of my memories are of us and so many of them are good. (you tend to remember the bad ones less). i'm slowly prying my fingers off the choke hold i have on the "what-ifs" on that one.

i've been letting go of expectations, judgements, grudges, some hopes and wishes. or trying to, at least. my disney annual pass. (another hard one). maybe some weight, in my dreams. i've also been letting go of a large chunk of my bank account thanks to some self-prescribed retail therapy.

most recently i let go of the habitrot. my baby. my proudest accomplishment since moving here (besides buying my house). in a way it's liberating and in another way it is totally devastating. but they say doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. so after 5 years, i decided it was time to move on.

i guess it hasn't all been letting go. there's been some trading, some gaining and some moving forward. on occasionally there is some wallowing.

i've been doing a spring cleaning of my house, getting rid of all my accumulated junk, i realized it's hard to move forward when you are carrying baggage of your past. sometimes its really painful to throw something away but once it's gone, you hardly miss it.

just don't expect me to throw away that notebook and teddy bear.