2019: My year of letting go
I first wrote the title of this post back in January 2019 and never had the time or the inclination to write or publish it and yet we are on the first day of 2020 and I am revisiting it after all.
At the time, I wanted to remind myself why I wanted to write the post, knowing I wouldn’t have time to finish it (but not expecting it to take me a year!!) so I wrote the following sentences as prompts;
I have a real victims mentality to everything that’s happened that wasn’t my fault
I am the pillar of my family
I didn’t let go
If anything I got more uptight
I have been burnt out for the whole year
I have zero self care and put myself bottom of the list
I put everyone before Jos and he just takes it
Work has actually been a release
Next year I would like to be better but probably won’t
And if that last sentence didn’t just about sum it up I don’t know where we go from here.
I finished 2018 feeling a bit worse for wear. I’d had a long Christmas break, the first proper break since I’d started my job the previous July and I submitted my tax return on the first of January (all feeling a bit deja vu if you’ve seen my Insta story this evening) and it gave me a 3 day cold and I felt shaky and ill and just not my best self.
Needless to say a few days later when I hopped on a plane to Copenhagen to spend quality time with my blog squad, I was feeling much more alive and kickin for the new year and forgot about my woes.
I wrote those prompts with genuine meaning and heart. I knew I was about to start planning a wedding for the following year and I knew I needed to take a break, to learn to chill, to put myself first and stop being so much of a pillar. I really meant it, it was fully what I intended to do.
So imagine my surprise when 2019 turned into one of the hardest years, into a year when planning a wedding came secondary to everything, when I took no breaks. when I ended up more burnt out than ever and when I was needed so much more than I have ever been before.
When I said I wanted to let go in 2019, I wanted to let go of other people’s problems primarily. Since the last quarter of 2014 my world as I knew it has been turned upside down and the theme has continued well into the second half of the decade and my victims mentality has definitely come from the fact it was never my fault. Other people’s actions were changing the course of my life and I felt hard done by, out of control and frustrated I couldn’t be the sulky teenager about it I wanted to be. No whining ‘this isn’t fair’ because I was holding together families and relationships that were ripping at the seams, all whilst 200 miles away trying to complete a degree.
In 2019 I wanted to let go of that. Let everyone flourish on their own two feet. Be selfish. Put me first. Put Jos first cos lord knows I don’t do that either.
And yet, in 2019, what happened was everything was flipped on it’s head again and I was needed more than ever. Emotional support. Advice. Counselling. Money help. Lifts. Shopping. My year of letting go evaporated before my very eyes and I have entered 2020 bleary, overwhelmed at what’s to come and in need of a fucking holiday.
And yet on the other hand, 2019 has had loads of fab memories. My reasoning for sharing all the positives on Instagram and not sharing the hard stuff that has made 2019 that one when you think it can’t get worse and the world goes “hold my bags”, is that it keeps that online space a bubble of happiness to look back on. A reminder that even in the shittiest of times, you can have a new baby niece and fall in love all over again. You can belly laugh, the most mental stories can turn into the best anecdotes and if all else fails, you have some lovely photos to look back on.
My year of letting go didn’t turn out quite the way I envisaged when I wrote those prompts back in 2019 but then again, I’m not sure I ever really thought it would anyway.