In The End, It’s You Versus Yourself

Let it go.

Let it go. You won’t change the outcome. You won’t make sense of the situation. And you won’t heal through repeated contemplation. In fact, you’ll merely make it worse.

I know you can feel it. You can feel it rising — you can see that wave begin to crest, that white cap beginning to form. You know it’s coming, and you know it’s going to crash. It’s going to crash right over you and take you under. It’s going to leave you gasping for air. The anticipation takes the bulk of the time, the formation of that wave deep out at sea. And it travels, quickly and haphazardly through the waters, sweeping and destructing whatever may be in its path. That wave is dangerous. And it’s coming for you.

Let it go. Rise to the top of that water. Breathe. In. Out. Fill your lungs. Float, calmly and controlled. Watch that wave of anxiety, worry, and stress as it crashes on shore and recedes out of sight. Just like that — it’s gone. Do you see it? Disappearing?

Let it go. Letting it go isn’t defeat. It isn’t a rising of the white flag and it isn’t a display of weakness. Letting it go is moving forward. Letting it go is moving on. Letting it go is surviving in a world in which survival is anything but a promise.

Take your worries, your stressors, and your anxieties and identify them. One by one, pick them up and carelessly throw them into the wind, remembering to take the time to smile between each and every glorious castaway.

Because it’s you. It’s you versus yourself. And it always has been. You may not have always been able to see it this way, and you may have always chosen not to, but it’s the truth. You’re your own biggest motivator and your own worst enemy. You can push yourself like no one else can. Do better, dig deeper, and take on more. And you can fall all on your own, too. Quickly and seemingly without warning. It’s your own mind, your own critiques and your own self-expectations that lead you here. You expect yourself to perform. You expect yourself to have nothing but the best. And you expect these things in others, too. So it’s only fitting that when these expectations begin to fall short, that water begins to rumble.

Be observant. There’s something marvelous about a calm body of water first thing in the morning or late at night. The calmness that you can so clearly sense, so clearly feel and recognize. You long for the same feeling. But that pond — well, it’s so easily disrupted. So easily rippled. And you, my friend, are too.