The Illusion of Letting Go

Why purging never frees us

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I’m searching the house for my journals. Years and years of history gone, disappeared. Panic overwhelms me. I freeze, sweating and confused. Where are they? Surrounded by cardboard moving boxes I grab my Exacto knife and slice through the one marked Paulette's office flinging books in the air, hearing the thump of defeat—my mind speaks in the shadows - “It’s just a dream, Paulette, it’s OK.” But in the deep canyon of sleep and wakefulness, I know that decades of journals have gone missing by my own command.

When my husband and I moved from Arizona six years ago, I was in a fit of minimalizing. More than a dozen trips to Goodwill and Kiwanis, strangers from Facebook marketplace roaming my home picking through the pickings of whatever I deemed up for grabs, with a dumpster outside I thought we’d never fill overflowing with a life I wanted to leave behind.

The journals, or precisely, spiral-bound ruled paper with three lines, one dotted in the middle, filled with longing that only the sharpened #2 lead pencil weapon of an eight-year-old can express—gone.

My writing life began early and was repeatedly interrupted. With marriage, divorce, marriage, a near-death due to an ectopic pregnancy, a child, dogs, and my best attempts to be it all—wife, mother, and damn-it, my own person, I went for long stretches without putting pen to paper. Yet, over the years, I still managed to transition from spiral notebooks to Moleskine.

When I stripped down the excess of my life, I began to listen deeply to what had always been calling me. Going in search of the past only to discover that the move from Arizona to a rural town in Southern Oregon was, in a small part, an attempt to purge myself. From myself.

And isn’t that the irony? I, who seize every opportunity to acknowledge the paradox of our human existence—who knows deep in my marrow that running from the shadows is a lesson in futility, that the shadow is the entry point into our fullness, our wholeness—was trying to cancel myself out.

The joke, of course, was on me. Just as Krishna warns Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita, until we fully accept who we are—shadow and light—collapse and unhappiness will always be.

In last week’s Part I of The Gita Series, I wrote: “I am lost. Gutted. On my knees with despair. Please, lord—whoever is listening—show me the light, the way forward.”

But life, in its insistence, calls us back to ourselves. The way forward is through. Even in moments of loss, even in the aching absence of what once was, the invitation remains—to return, to meet ourselves where we’re at without shame, to sit in the mess until we see what emerges.

Perhaps the journals were never really important for me to find. Perhaps they were a mirror, reflecting the deeper truth that no matter what, we can never discard ourselves without losing our story. That every part of who we are, our mistakes and our triumphs, holds the keys to living our dharma.

Questions for the Comments

What part of yourself have you tried to discard—and why?

Part Two in The Gita Series is taking longer to write than I had hoped, so it will be delivered in your inbox next week.