I have had many problems in my life, one of the worst has been struggling to learn how to let go.  In my early life, I was forever having raging arguments with the people around me – my parents, siblings, teachers, demons real and imagined. I was often stuck in the hurts and slings and arrows that are part of everyone’s life, yours as well as mine.

At times, I was obsessive, at times in a rage. In my mind, I was hurt so often, I tried to reason, argue and plead with the world to understand me, to listen to me, to see the pain I was in. Sometimes I think my whole life was in arguments in my head, seeking a reckoning that would never come, understanding that could never be, apologies I would never hear or see.

I never won those arguments,  saw that justice, the world never did what I wanted it to do, or ever said, “oh, you are right, we are wrong, so sorry to have hurt you.”

I never understood the concept and value of letting go until recently.

I was hurt by something that happened recently. It evoked the old sense of betrayal and oppression – and abuse – that I lived with for so long. I was wronged. I was  no understood. I was treated unfairly.  I wanted justice, I wanted to be listened to and reasoned with, I wanted yet again the acknowledgement that I was right, and I was good.

A selfish and pointless way to feel and to think. One that never works. It just gets you stuck like a truck caught in mud. You just spin your wheels.

In my years of talking therapy, I finally learned that you cannot win those arguments, you cannot have a healthy relationship with unhealthy people – and I have so often been an unhealthy person. I’ve learned that true and lasting friendships do not end in eternal argument, confusion and resentment. They just don’t. Friendships are, by definition, nourishing and uplifting and comforting. Good friends are there when you need them, not when you don’t.

“If it doesn’t feel right,” a very wise friend told me, “run away. Just run away, and don’t look back.”

I cannot control anyone but myself. Acceptance does not come from anyone but myself. If people refuse to look at me as I am or in a new light, if they will not listen to me and talk to me, if they can only see me for what I was or what they need me to be, if they can only see me for the mistakes I make, even when they are not my mistakes, then they have to go. I have to let them go.

That does not mean arguing with them, pleading with them, talking to them in anger and hurt and pain. It means letting go. Walking away, turning from drama and argument. They have to go. The situation has to go. Your own mind has to let go, one of the most powerful ways to love yourself that there is.

It is, after all, so easy to spend your life justifying yourself, begging for yourself, licking wounds, casting arguments in your head, writing scripts that will never see life or reality. I call it self-abuse, it takes what was done to you, and then you just turn it on yourself, over and over again.

Do not speak poorly of  your life, do not argue it over and over again in your head.

This morning, I was angry and hurt about something, I know that is not a healthy way to be or think. I sat down to meditate, I read one of my favorite passages from the Dalai Lama.

“In the end,” he wrote, “what matters most is how well did you love, how well did you live, how well did you learn to let go.”

I am learning to love well, beginning to live well, learning to let go.

I let go of my pain and hurt, I imagined it as a beautiful white sailing ship, heading out of a beautiful harbor in full sail, a flock of beautiful gulls circling the ship, escorting it out to the open sea, the big and beautiful ship beginning to ride up and down on the waves.  I watched it catch the wind and grow smaller and smaller.

And I let go.