A few months ago I did a thing I had vowed never to do. I sent a letter to someone I had promised myself I wouldn’t contact again. I had known for a long time that I was depriving myself of resolution by not attempting contact, but I had been prioritising avoiding the discomfort I perceived I may cause them by reaching out. My world would not let it go, and so I relented, changed my priorities, and wrote the damn letter.
If you’d like an interesting exercise, write someone you love a letter telling them all the beautiful things you’d like to tell them, and then read it back to yourself as if you had received it. If you want to make the whole thing a lot more uncomfortable for yourself, write them a letter that you actually send, keep yourself a copy, and read that back as if you had received it. Compare and contrast. Because those two letters, I’m fairly confident, are going to be different letters.
Though I hadn’t kept a copy, my letter in this instance was returned to sender, and so I had the very literal experience of receiving it. I hid it for a couple of months, unwilling to look at it. But my world would not let it go, so eventually I relented and opened the fucker up.
I had actually done the first part of the above exercise at some point fairly recently because a guy on YouTube told me to. I’d written them an unreserved, matter-of-fact love letter, which was a fine but hardly revelatory experience to read back, given the facts I had already written them countless unsent letters over the years, and I’d also very deliberately worked on using my experienced love for them to inform my newly constructed love for me.
The Undelivered Letter, though, that, as they say, hit different. It was different. It was well constructed, it was warm, it was light, it was funny. It was self-aware. But it was also dripping with deference and apology. And, as I now have self-esteem to speak of, I found that particularly off-putting. As a person who loves me, I didn’t understand why I was so sorry to confess my love. Why was I apologising for taking up space, when I was there simply to wish me only good things? Sure, I was teasing myself about it, but why was I throwing myself at my feet? Why did I think I was so unworthy of my time and attention? The whole vibe fatigued me.
And that’s when I understood why this has been haunting me for so long. I lost a part of myself when I fell in love with this person, because I was so ashamed to fall in love with them. More accurately, I was ashamed of the part of me that couldn’t be without them once I had. The part of me that was desperate for them to reciprocate my love, and thus acted in desperation when they turned their back on me. I disowned that part of myself for many years, and I didn’t recognise it again until I read that fucking letter.
That was the resolution I needed. I needed to accept that part of me back, even though it was offputting. That part of me still craved my love.
This was a saga I had accepted would never be over for me, despite never being anything else either. So I was reluctant to believe that an Undelivered Letter could hold within it The Answer. But that point of focus that I couldn’t disengage myself from has dissolved. I simply don’t look there anymore. I can look there, but there’s nothing in particular to see anymore. My world has let it go. I have let it go.
We hold onto things for a reason. Often not the reason we think. Trying to let go through force of will may be ill-advised, but that doesn’t mean our fate is to keep holding on. Maybe we need to write a letter, or look in the mirror, or do the thing we’re afraid of doing, I don’t know. But I think our world tells us what needs to be done. I’m just particularly bad at yielding to its direction.