Day 8: The Releasing
Releasing is often misunderstood as something gentle or peaceful. In truth, releasing is usually born from exhaustion. The body realizes it cannot continue to carry what the mind refuses to let go. Release is not forgiveness. It is not clarity that arrives neatly. Release is what happens when survival chooses itself. To release is not just an idea, but a threshold to cross… when holding on begins to cost more than letting go, and when survival is asking for something you don’t want to give up.
Releasing is deeper than clearing and pausing. It is even deeper than recognizing triggers. It reaches into places we don’t often talk about… the places shaped by loss, memory, and attachment. Some things don’t leave because we understand them. They leave because the body can’t keep carrying them. Not because we are weak or because it never mattered. But because they were once safe. Once home. And these memories do not loosen their grip just because something is no longer good for us. Grief doesn’t disappear because we understand something intellectually.
It is human to want to hold on. Especially to people who, at one point, claimed to love you. We want to hold on to versions of life we imagined and memories that still carry warmth and pain, all in the same breath. Letting go is not natural. It goes against our very instincts. The body resists it because release often feels like loss, even when it is absolutely necessary to your mental health and wellbeing.
There are people who leave our lives without leaving our minds. People we had to let go of, even though part of us still reaches for them. Sometimes people we care about are gone from this world, too soon for us. Sometimes it is because staying connected would require us to keep hurting ourselves. The kind of loss that doesn’t have a ceremony... no closure… just a quiet reckoning where you realize that holding on is slowly costing you your ability to live fully. These goodbyes happen internally. We joke about “mental funerals,” but for many of us, they are the only way to stop bleeding from a wound that never closes on its own and didn’t deserve to be there at all.
Releasing isn’t forgetting. It isn’t about strength. It’s about honesty. About recognizing when holding on is no longer loyalty, but self-abandonment. This is how some of us save ourselves. Not by pretending it didn’t hurt, but by finally setting down what we were never meant to carry forever. It’s choosing not to keep reopening wounds that no longer need reopening. It’s choosing life… even when the choice hurts.
Quiet Part Day 8: Some releases feel like grief because they are. I didn’t release because it was easy. I released because I wanted to live.
January 8th, 2026
