(Not about me, just my writing style but I hope it relates).

Nobody warned me letting go wasn't a single decision. I made it, felt proud of myself for about a day, and then had to make it again the following week, and then again a month after that, usually at some random moment that had nothing to do with anything. A song comes on. A street corner looks familiar for half a second before I remember why. Someone mentions a name in passing, completely unrelated to me, and my whole chest reacts like it was personally addressed. Letting go, it turns out, works more like a door that keeps drifting back open, gently, on its own, and has to be closed again every single time, than a door that closes once and stays that way. I used to think this meant I hadn't actually done it right the first time. If it kept coming back, surely the letting go had failed somewhere. I don't think that anymore. I think it's just what letting go of anything that mattered actually looks like, up close, instead of the tidy version everyone talks about. There's a specific kind of tired that comes from holding onto something for a long time, the way a hand cramps eventually just from staying closed too long, regardless of whether the thing inside was ever worth the grip. My hand opened one day simply because it got tired, plain and simple, not because I'd made some peace with losing whatever it was holding. Tired turned out to matter more than any decision I thought I was making. I think that's the part nobody prepares you for. The culture around letting go is full of language about choosing it, deciding it, doing the work. All of that's real, some of the time. But plenty of letting go isn't chosen so much as it's arrived at, the way exhaustion arrives, slowly, then suddenly you notice your hand isn't clenched anymore and you can't remember exactly when that happened. I've noticed letting go doesn't actually require caring less. That surprised me, honestly. I still care about most of what I've had to let go of over the years. How much that caring was allowed to cost me, day to day, is what actually changed, before I finally started protecting myself from the price of it. For a long time I confused those two things completely. I thought if I still cared, I hadn't really let go, and if I'd really let go, the caring should have gone with it. That math never actually worked, though I kept trying to force it to. I can still care about someone, still feel something when their name comes up, and also no longer let that feeling run my whole afternoon. Those aren't contradictions. They just felt like contradictions for a long time because nobody told me they could coexist. Well-being, in this context, has turned out to mean something smaller and more specific than I expected, the decision that missing someone or something doesn't get to run my whole week anymore, doesn't get to decide whether today counts as a good day before the day has even had a chance to start on its own, rather than the absence of missing them at all. That's a much lower bar than the version of letting go I used to imagine, the dramatic one, the clean-break one, the one where you wake up one morning and simply don't feel it anymore. That version rarely seems real for most people, honestly, more often just a morning where the memory shows up, gets acknowledged, and then doesn't get to keep the whole day hostage the way it used to. That's not nothing. It just doesn't look like the movie version. I still let go of the same thing sometimes, more than once, on random Tuesdays that give no warning they're about to ask something of me. I've stopped treating that as failure. It's just maintenance now, closing the door again, the same way I'd close a window that keeps drifting open on its own, because the room gets cold otherwise, nothing personal against the wind. I think if there's a version of this worth actually believing, it's that letting go was always going to be a door I get to keep closing, calmly, as many times as it drifts open, for as long as it takes, without needing the drifting to stop first before I'm allowed to call any of it progress, rather than a single locked door closed once and never touched again.