I've never been good at letting go. Holding on is more my style. I hold on to friends, experiences, emotions, song lyrics, old letters, ribbons, paper bags, ring-pulls, images from National Geographic, articles I'll never get around to reading, fabrics I'll never get around to using, random objects I'll never get around to incorporating into artworks. Given the choice I would probably amass all these things on an island somewhere and never let any of them go. (And good googly moogly, wouldn't it be nice to have all yer mates in one place!)
However... we all know that holding on isn't always healthy. Sometimes there's no choice but to let go. For instance, when the person you've been deeply in love with for more than a year says, point blank, "I'm letting you go." And via text message at that.
On Saturday - when that final text hit - my heart dissolved and spent the next six hours leaking out my eyeballs. It was my most spectacular crying effort yet... and I am a champion cryer. I can cry over artworks and trees and nappie ads, through entire children's movies and over any kind of speech. But this six-hour-stint impressed even me, particularly since I was at the Bathurst Show at the time. I cried in face-painting queues, over cake displays, in front of Norman the two tonne prize bull, watching the diving piglets, eating cinnamon donuts, talking to beribboned sheep, waving at dodgems. That night Mewi and I talked through my heart's dissolvement and I cried lots more. By this stage my face had puffed up like a big pink whoopie cushion and I wondered whether I might have actually developed an allergy to my own tears. Thankfully by Sunday I was down to a couple of cries. Yesterday there were none. Today my face looks vaguely normal.
Instead of crying I used yesterday's long drive back to the Can to workshop strategies for letting go...
1. Apply awesome maths skills
First I looked to lessons already learned and determined that it took me about 3 years to fully recover from the break-up of my 11 year relationship. This basic formula (and some quick roadside calculations) revealed that I should be feeling good as gold in approximately 3.81 months or 114.3 days. At least 61 of those days will be whisked away by intensive study and prac, leaving only 53.3 days to get through. The days get less severe as they go, so the last 53.3 should be easy peasy. Although I do have to simultaneously deal with Canberra's winter and I will be housesitting approximately five minutes walk away from his place. D'oh!
2. Address proximity factors
Proximity factors = the places that we went together or that in any way remind me of him. Yesterday I had to have a roadside wee rather than use the public toilet at Taralga because I remembered us stopping there together many moons ago. Seriously. Dude.
3. Address emotional factors
Emotional factors = the ludicrous emotional associations that I insist on pinning to the things that took on significance within our relationship. And we are talking pretty much everything from scrambled eggs to Little Golden Books to pine trees to the phrase "your mother".
I think both of these are best addressed in the same way: by not indulging in oversentimentality; by practicing exposure where it's practical (like with eggs and books and trees, which clearly I'm not giving up); and avoidance where it makes more sense (like altering my route to uni so that I'm not driving past his street twice a day).
4. Fill gaps
This is by far the trickiest strategy to implement. After stupidly throwing myself into one very intense relationship I now have not much of a life outside of study. Luckily I have two gorgeous uni mates and a couple of fledgling friendships outside of uni. I also have my creative practice which I suddenly have time for again! Yippee! I've actually been contributing to my writing group and dreaming up drawings and working on the world's slowest stitch series. And it seriously helps. As the beautiful Birdsworth said it would with the wonderful words "It does hurt like a mutha fucka - no use pretending - but channel that shit somewhere. Write, draw, create." Stay tuned for some new Flickr albums for a glimpse at the writing, drawing, creating.
That's by no means the end of the strategies but that's more than enough for now. It feels good to have shifted myself into a positive brainspace. All I have to do is keep it up for the next 111.3 days. Wish me luck!
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