Learning to Let Go - Day 121

I've been hitting a wall and I haven't really known how to get over or around it, or even if I can get over or around it. I keep hoping it'll just crumble. I keep thinking, "I've never done that before, it's totally new to me, what do I need to do?" and hoping that someone might have the answer (I've not looked everywhere I could for an answer).

The truth is that I have one friend that has been my friend for more than just a couple years. Only one friend that I am actively in touch with, whom I have known for longer than just a couple of years. We've been friends for 10 years, since I was 15.

There was a point however, when I was 17 and she was 18, that we almost stopped being friends. Why? Because she did something I didn't expect her to do. She "betrayed" me by being herself, and not the image of her I had created, not the person I had wanted her to be so that I could feel safe and secure and know what to expect. We fought about it, and I cried a lot, and I felt really angry, and I felt really abandoned, and then I abandoned her and myself by abandoning the friendship over this petty incident.

How exactly I came around, I'm not totally sure. I think it was that the next year I went off to college myself, and I grew up a little, and I learned what it's like to be a freshman at college, and although I didn't decide to do what she had done, I did other similar things, and I began to see how that kind of thing happens, how it isn't such a "bad" thing and it doesn't make a person "bad" for partaking.

Eventually, I apologized. We've laughed about it since. Since, there have been times when I have felt really ashamed of how I rejected her because of her behavior, because of my opinion of her behavior. I rejected a person because of what I thought about something she did, some action she took. A person! And not just any person, but a person who really was a good friend, who supported me unconditionally through some really tough shit that nobody else wanted to even look at or acknowledge was there.

There have been times where it has hit me how much I value this friendship and how I basically threw it away years ago, and how I could still not have it, if I hadn't reflected and apologized and realized my mistake. Fortunately in that instance it didn't take me "too long" to do so, although it was still about a year.

When I reconnected with a friend from college a couple weeks ago I saw how crazy it was that it took me 5 years to take responsibility for myself, and 5 years for all of the negative reactions to become meaningless to me, to be things I didn't want to hold onto anymore.

So anger is something I like holding onto. That's what a grudge is, right? And it still comes back to my wanting retribution for what I perceive as others doing "wrong," or create consequences if none seem to appear.

To note: perception of something wrong, seeming to appear. This is all based on what I am able to perceive, which is not much. I do not know the full story behind a person's actions or behaviors; I only know my reaction. I do not know what actual consequences have manifested beyond the ones within myself as my reaction. And here I am just perpetuating consequence for myself and others by holding grudges and holding onto anger.

And my reactions are completely mine. My reaction of holding onto anger is a reaction. It isn't real, it doesn't have to be real except that I make it real, I manifest into and as myself into and as reality as how I move and direct myself.

I was telling a student last week, there is so much more to life than her emotions and what she feels right in this moment. I told her there are things that used to upset me, that don't upset me anymore, because I don't let them upset me.

So why do I still react? Why do I still hold onto anger? I want to. I accept and allow it. I crave it. Why? Why can't I just let it go, as I did with my friend from high school, or as I finally eventually did with my friend from college? Did I ever really let it go from myself? I mean if I am angry, it is not at anyone else. It is at me. Why am I so angry at myself, and why do I so resist letting go? And what will it take to really truly see realize and understand that this anger is sourced with me and directed at me, so that I can stop projecting it onto others and destroying friendships and continuing to hurt myself through engaging in self abusive relationship patterns?

What if I didn't react? What if I could step outside myself as my reactions for a moment and just see? What if I could remove the emotions and just see what is here? People. Life. Suffering beyond my imagination, so far beyond the suffering I create and preoccupy myself with within my mind. Abuses that I accept and allow in myriad form, including through and as my own abuse of myself. What if I could see the span of time, the all, and what if I could see the point in time in the future when I finally let go? Why not now?

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hide behind my anger, to create walls of anger between myself and other life, life with and toward which I am one and equal, and so separating myself in divisions of anger and resentment and bitterness.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to hide from other people when I am angry at them, to want to keep the walls up, the defenses up, because I do not want to be vulnerable, because within my mind they are the one who hurt me.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see, realize, and understand once again that when I build walls as grudges, I am confining myself, locking myself into and as my mind, like locking myself in a room with my enemy, because I am the only one here who is capable of hurting me.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to actually forgive myself, but to instead punish myself constantly through building walls of anger.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to continue to project my anger and blame onto others so that I can pretend like I am not the person who is responsible for myself and who I am, but that it is this other person who has done this to me, and this other person is to blame, and so I have to just sit here and wait until it dissipates or passes, or wait until someone rescues me, or wait until someone provides me with enough sympathy and care as like a medicine to heal me, not realizing that I am the person who is wounding myself, I am the person who is not allowing myself to heal.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to build a wall of anger and grudges and then wonder why I keep on hitting this fucking wall. No shit. I put that there. That is the same wall I built to "protect" myself, and now it is keeping me in, because I keep on "hitting" it, because I built it so thick and so tall that not even I can get out.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold onto anger.

I commit myself to investigating why I hold onto anger.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want others to suffer because I myself have created suffering for myself.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want others to face consequences because I myself have created consequences for myself.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to just accept and allow reality, accept and allow other individuals to walk their lives as their processes, to take absolute and unconditional responsibility for myself, because without doing this I am useless to changing the world, because without this I am not changing myself. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to continue to focus more on what others are doing than I do on what I am doing, and who I am, and why.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I know what is going on for another person within their life within their inner world, and that within this knowledge I believe I have, I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I can identify if/when/as another person has done "wrong," that this person should be punished for having done "wrong" rather than simply understood, so I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to understand another or understand myself, instead reacting and operating from and as reaction, blame, projection of anger, and desire for punishment and retribution.

It is like the militaristic model at the school I work at. They make absolutely no effort to understand the student or the behavior. All they see is the behavior and its immediate results, and to this they react with an iron fist to bring about their own power and control as exacting punishment as like revenge for their offense that any person could behave in such a way. How dare he have his hands in his pockets while standing in formation. How dare he do something that any person might do in that circumstance, in that series of events.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become offended by others, believing they have done wrong, allowing myself to become offended as my ego, and within this defensive, wanting to defend my stance as my ego as where I was standing before the offense threw me off base, because I did not expect that.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to have expectations of others just as I have created expectations of physical reality so that when something goes "wrong" I believe it is the other, and not myself, who is wrong, because here I have established this expectation or plan, and placed myself in opposition to reality, not one with and equal to and as myself within physical reality, one whole, standing stable, but instead able to moved and swayed by the changes, and so expecting and hoping nothing to change, expecting and hoping things to always remain the way I expect and hope they will be, and when they do not, losing my footing, losing my balance, becoming offended, and reacting in defensive anger and resentment with a desire for punishment and retribution rather than stopping, breathing, and seeing myself, seeing how my standpoint was not stable, I was not stable, and that is why I fell.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use others as examples for myself of who I should be rather than being my own example. I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to do what I know is right in self honesty, to do what I know is best for all. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold onto anger because I do not want to let it go, I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold onto anger because it is in my own self-ish interest to hold onto and fling it outward like a cannon ball to attack others with my anger, to continually lob bombs of blame onto others, so that I do not have to look at myself, I am only looking through and over my fortress of walls I have built to defend myself, built also thus to keep myself in.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to direct myself based in my perceptions of what seems to be happening, rather than through and as self honesty and self responsibility, focusing thus on myself instead of others.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create conflict and friction through and as my reactions, manifesting my reactions into and as myself and into and as physical reality through how I direct myself from and as those reactions.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to get caught up in my own emotions and reactions, my own little internal reality, that I cannot see reality for what it really is anymore, that I cannot really even see myself, but am instead caught and swept up in an internal story with characters and personalities and drama and conflict and motifs and morals, holding on also to an ending as dictated by me, trying to match reality with the story in my mind, and resisting reality when it does not coincide with the story I have created in my mind.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to crave emotional energetic experiences such as anger, believing that I need these experiences and this energy.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to maintain crippling anger toward and as myself, not allowing myself to investigate the source root of this anger and to gut myself of this anger, to rid myself of this anger, to let it go.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to resist seeing myself as this anger as the creator of this anger so much that I blame others for my anger and I blame others for my emotional energetic experiences.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want others to face specific consequences or somehow redeem themselves in my eyes, come to me and confess their sins, or say they were wrong, or take ownership of their behavior, where even if the most awful thing imaginable was done unto me, I would have to move on with or without that kind of confession, that kind of ownership or responsibility taken by another; I would have to take ownership and responsibility for myself, I would have to move on. Why don't I move on?

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing MYSELF to be contingent on others, my experience of myself contingent on the actions or words of others, where first I reacted, "because" of another, and now I resist moving on and letting go, "because" of another.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to let go. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to suffocate myself through and as my own self interest in holding onto my anger, fear, resentment, and other emotional energetic experiences. I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to really breathe.

I commit myself to learning to let go. I commit myself to letting go. I commit myself to being here within and as myself fully, absolutely, unconditionally, which means: self support, self honesty, self responsibility, as what is best for all, and that is it. That's all. No more judgment of myself or another. No more anger. No more justification. No more excuses. No more waiting. No more hoping. No more believing. No more wishing. No more resisting. No more looking at others and waiting for others and judging others and depending on others and expecting of others. Only me, myself, and absolute unconditional honesty, support, and responsibility.