Learning to Let Go

Part of our health and well-being is our mental health. For me, this is something I have been striving to obtain for many many years now. After eight years of therapy I can say that I am making great strides, and am happy to report that I discovered earlier this year that I'm not the crazy one (in most cases, anyway), but I'm actually rather normal. My biggest issue is that I am a very sensitive individual and after having suppressed this side of myself for so long (28+ years) I am finally starting to learn how to be my true self without becoming the "crazy" one.

Now, I am a sensitive person, but not to the point where I cry at the drop of a hat or take offense at everything. No, I'm just your basic everyday living breathing sensitive person who has a good heart and wants to believe that others have a good heart too. My sensitivity comes to the forefront when I am treated wrong or disrespected, and for a long time now that has caused me to react with a lot of anger. This stems from a lot of things, and by removing the source of where the anger and frustration started I am actually doing much better than I normally would be. However, I do get my feelings hurt in a big way when someone doesn't treat me as I would like to be treated- especially if it is manipulative or abusive in any way (that's when I really get upset). In all fairness, my sensitivity is normal or should be normal, but in today's society we are taught to not have feelings and suppress emotions. Yeah. After 20+ years of that I discovered that wasn't work so well for me and was actually making me one of the "crazy" ones.

Anyway, today I had a coworker really treat me in a manner that I felt was dismissive, manipulative, and rude which caused my sensitivity to boil over. When I told my coworkers something didn't feel right early on, they all assured me that it was probably just in my head and things were fine, agreeing that I was probably reading in to it too much. Then I got a whammy where my gut was right and the situation panned out in the way I hoped it wouldn't. The coworker who mistreated me was one who I never pinned for being that kind of person, and I'm still not sure why things had to play out the way that they did. Perhaps I am naive in assuming that people can be straightforward with each other. Maybe I'm totally disillusioned in this matter, and maybe I'm completely missing the boat altogether. Thankfully, I have a wonderful therapist and friends who reassure me all the time that when these things happen I'm not being crazy and completely over-sensitive.

The largest probably for me is learning to let go of those negative experiences. It takes me a long time to move on from those hurt feelings and stop talking about it. Sometimes it feels as though I have to vent a certain number of times before the "ick" is out of my system and I can drop it. Sometimes, it just takes a conversation with the offender/instigator to get a better understanding of where things went wrong. Either way, I'm not one of those people who can just move on with it as though nothing happened right away. I wonder if it's something in my DNA, or better yet, something in how I was taught when I was growing up. I believe in a lot of ways I was taught to hold on to my anger, frustration and hurt, and in some respects I taught myself how to hold on to it because they were the only true feelings I had. It's just so hard for me to move on, as much as I desperately want to.

With this situation, I have to move on and stop wasting energy on it. I have one week left at that job, and in the grand scheme of things it really only makes it easier to leave that job. It doesn't make me feel any better about it, but there are times when I have to learn to let go and stop fighting. I've spent so much of my life fighting for people to treat each other nice and I haven't gotten very far with that battle. This is one fight that is not worth my energy at this juncture, but had I been staying at the job I would have fought it hard.

I'm going to learn to let go slowly but surely. It's just going to take a lot more time to break my body and mind of their old unhealthy habits.