Letting Go

Al-Anon teaches me to turn my will and my life over to the care of my higher power. Many people in the program describe this as “turning it over to god,” with the “it” being the hardship of whatever current moment they are in. Since my higher power is the knowledge of the program, and doesn’t lend itself as easily to the personification necessary to turn something over, I prefer to “let it go.”

Let it go.

This works for me because I hold on so tight. I have held on tightly to pain and fear, and am now ready to let them go. I have held on tightly to my emotions so that they would never get out of control. I have and continue to hold on very tightly to what others think of me. I have held on tightly to life in general and have succeeded in choking the life out of life and making myself exhausted and sick in the process.

In letting go of this mindset I am ready to start loving myself and paying attention to myself. I am ready to pay attention to what I want and what I feel. In the past I have tried so hard to ignore or destroy any shred of desire or emotion. I am beginning to understand what is meant when people say that before anyone can love you, you must first love yourself. It would be like hating the state of Virginia with every breath of every day and yet still expecting to fall in love with someone who was born and raised there. I need to learn to love me, and only then can I have any respect for the love that someone else shows me.

I like to say that I am ready to start loving myself. I AM ready to start loving myself. I have a lot of great and loveable characteristics. I am a smart guy and I am good person. I deserve to feel love and happiness. I deserve to feel love and happiness. I deserve to feel love and happiness. I am a good person and that is completely independent from any relationship I have been in, any people I have angered, or any shortcomings I have had. I have always tried to do the best I could with the tools I had available at the time.

I am ready to let go of the habit of thinking about others first. I am just as important as everyone else in the world and deserve just as much attention. I am unaccustomed to paying attention to me and as a result can infer the attitudes of others with ease but don’t have a clue about how to look at myself. What would I see if I turned the same skilled observation tactics on myself that I constantly use on others? Right now I see confusion.

I see a person who doesn’t know what to do without the cues of other people. I see someone who is bored a lot of the time and exhausted the rest of the time. I see someone who needs a break and a hug and someone to listen. I see someone who is scared of being like other people and making the mistakes that others make. I see someone who is very scared to be average. I see a child who wants with all his heart to be unique and special and powerful and loved. I see a child who started telling himself that these feelings were wrong before he could ever understand why.

I never allowed myself to explore these feelings and so I was never able to come to an understanding about their powerful dynamics. Selfishness is when we take the principles of caring for ourselves too far and start infringing on the rights of others. The only way to learn where the line is that transforms self love into selfishness is by exploring it. I was always so afraid of imposing on others that I never wanted to go anywhere near the line. I never wanted to risk my needs becoming a burden to anyone so I tried not to have any needs. I deserve to make mistakes.

I deserve to be loved.
I deserve to be cared for.
I deserve attention and I deserve to be happy.