How do You Let Go? and Other questions

You’ve been on this date before. It’s with that cute person you just met, a person who you instantly clicked with at a cozy dinner party hosted by mutual friends, and you guys kept talking on Instagram for days after until making plans of your own. You’re not really sure if it’s a date because the plans are too casual, but you hope that it turns into one. You’re so excited about it that you get a haircut the day before, thrift a new shirt, and start to wonder, “Damn, what if? What if this is the person I’ll do life with?” You know it’s too soon, but you also know that it’s possible. You’d be an idiot to not write it down, to remember the words they said, the way they looked at you, and the awkward but careful motion of those first touches.

This was me in November.

I was on a (date?) with this person in my living room and we played the We’re Not Really Strangers card game when the ex-love of her life entered the room like the gust of wind just before lightning hits. It must have been one of the questions, I don’t remember. I remember being shocked. Not by lightning but how she was able to express such raw grief, messy and real, about a person she loved. I was repulsed and I think it was in that way that I usual am by people who express themselves in the ways that I wish I could.

My feelings toward her weren’t just pitched by the amount and immediacy of the pain she felt, but by its relatability. It was as if she had reminded me of something that existed inside me but I was too scared to express.

We did not see each other much longer. I admitted that it felt like her grief was so big that there wasn’t space for my own. In response, she told me that the way two people make space is together, by talking—asserting correctly that I had never expressed my own desire for space to grieve.

Truth is, I’m not sure what it means to grieve, despite the loss I’ve lived through, but something told me that A was not being dramatic. That the trouble which had crashed on her life was outsized and unfair and she had every right to grieve in the fashion that she did. But what about me?

Despite the short time that we knew each other, she left me with a thought tangled up in my insides which pulled on strings that I was certain I’d loosened years ago. Had I? Had I really allowed myself to inhabit the memory of pain and loss in a way that amounted to grief, or had I been swept away with grief’s more seductive cousin, sadness? Somehow I knew that there was a difference. Perhaps I didn’t know how to grieve at all.  

For the past five years, I have been on a strange journey. The start of which began the moment I got off a plane in Juneau, Alaska in 2019 during the most physically and mentally depressed summer of my life to stay for four months with M and it was what changed the course of everything that came after. It was a place and time where I was loved deeply by a kind and patient woman who waited for me to heal as began my first therapy sessions to try and get at whatever it was that was making me so deep down sad that I started wondering if I would make it to thirty—only six months away at the time.

There was also something about Alaska, too. For me it was a place so magnetic that it felt as if it called for me each time I left.

In my first visit to Alaska, I remember how fast my heartbeat grew, and how loud, like a Geiger counter approaching something radioactive, as I stepped onto the thick green carpet of a tundra draped valley which cradled the silvery current of a snaking creek as it rushed down the slick, black, and imposing mountains of the Talkeetna range.

What am I here for? I asked.

The wind picked up then. A howling blast, fresh off a glacier tucked into the upper terraces of the mountains, spilled through the valley and nearly pushed me over.

It was just the wind. But I knew that I would keep coming back until it answered the question.

The next year I returned, and despite staying for longer and going even deeper into the Talkeetna Range, I came back scars but still no answers.

The year after that, when I was with M in Juneau, something told me that I either going to find an answer or perhaps never find my way out. It was my personal Barbie movie (what was I made for…) but staged in a harsher, colder climate.

I believed I knew what I was made for: to write, eventually. Yet, I didn’t know how to be the kind of honest writer that I wanted to be. The kind of person who can for God’s sake just give an honest account about what it feels like to be a human on this planet. I wanted to be free to talk about those feelings, no matter how weird, dirty, or ashamed I had been programmed to do so by my culture, parents, or Christian conditioning that was oh so good at delineating for me exactly where good and acceptable behavior begin and end. That was where the problem laid, in my inability to break outside a cage whose bars were made with the words I hadn’t said yet. But to tell you the truth, at the end of that summer that dimmed quickly into the oppressive darkness of winter in Juneau, Alaska, I didn’t know yet how language would change my life.

The light in the dead of winter only lasted about six hours between the clouds and the steep mountains that blocked the trajectory of sun. By December, it felt as if the only daylight we got was hardly a mid-morning gray before returning to darkness again. It rained and it rained, as if the clouds were trying to scrub the mountains clean. Yet, between the combination of M’s love, therapy, moments of kindness from others, a movie, a play, and the Alaskan wilderness, I finally began to face what had been building up inside of me since I had run hard and fast from my parents’ small but forested homestead in a lonely corner of eastern Washington state at nineteen—nearly ten years beforehand.

Yet, on the top of the list when I arrived in Juneau, the first thing I had to face, was my sexuality. I knew I was bisexual (or something a little more circuitous than straight) since I was a little kid but could never talk about it. As the child of evangelicals, without any real influences in my life beyond my parents and the church until I was eighteen, I believed that the devil had gotten all up inside me, and it was my job to kick him out. Hell, my parents openly spoke about how homosexuals were going to burn in hell, and it was LGBTQ legislation granting equal rights to workers in Oregon that was the final straw prompting them to flee the suburbs in the first place. My whole life had been one long lesson in how to hate myself. Even after I moved to western Washington and solidly past my mid-twenties, I did not feel safe to be me because I’d never had anyone show me how. I also felt as if I had missed the window for coming out. As if it was something I should have already figured out already, and that didn’t make it any easier. I would just gaslight myself. Tell myself that it wasn’t that big of a deal, that it wasn’t something I needed to admit. As you can guess, that didn’t make things any better.

In Juneau, I began to see how ridiculous my fear of coming out was. I even felt a sort of criminal shame for not doing so, to remain outside the chorus of people who proudly and bravely to tell the world they don’t fit into the clinical model of sexuality that anti-human religious morals established, especially when I was lucky enough to live in a time and place when I did not (likely) stand a chance at being killed or deported or sent to an insane asylum for expressing my sexuality truthfully.

Regardless, telling the truth was terrifying. Once I did, I was a little surprised (disappointed even?) that none of the people in my life were waiting to strike me over the head with a bat like I’d imagined, that God did not strike me dead with a bolt of lightning, and that M’s love carried me through the whole thing. She’d rarely held me tighter than the night that I told her, crying like a baby. I thought it was the end of everything and, in a way, it was. But it was also the beginning of everything, too.

Just under two months after that night, and only three days before Christmas, M and I said goodbye for the last time outside of a friend’s home in Queen Anne after we returned from Juneau. To this day, four and a half years later, it is the last I’ve seen her except through the glass of my iPhone. It may have seemed at the time, from the way my mental health plummeted in the little over a year that we dated, that our love was no good for me. Yet, it was the sincerity and magnitude of her love, the completeness of it, that was a major reason I’d tripped headlong into a sun swallowing depression. In my twenty-nine years of living, I hadn’t learned how to love myself. I hadn’t even begun to try.

When I met M, I realized the love of my life had arrived and I was completely unprepared.  

A month later in 2020, M went to California, and I started over in the Seattle—a city that had only became mine when she showed it to me—and started the first steps to where I am now.

It was because of M and Alaska that allowed the beginning of everything that happens afterward. And every year after, the story only gets better.

Five years later, I feel as if I am living a dream. I’m a year from graduating with my bachelor’s from University of Washington (first gen and first of my brothers) and preparing for applications for an MFA—during which time I intend to work on, finish, and publish my childhood stories and those from the years after, including M and my story in Juneau. I’ve lived in a wonderful little spot in the neighborhood of Ravenna in Seattle for all those years. I have filled my home with plants and art, and I feel more at home than I ever have. I learned how to play piano. I adopted a wonderful little cat named Prabu. A couple years after M, I fell in love again, and even though this woman never accepted me in the way M had, it was a beautiful relationship, I am so glad that it happened, and that it nudged me further along the journey I began back in Juneau. Then, a year after that relationship ended, and only seven months from this day, one of my closest friends broke up with me on Christmas morning. It was doubly tragic to me because this person was someone I became friends with the moment I returned from Juneau, who served as a throughline for the years since, but also because I loved him dearly and didn’t understand the proportionality of his reaction to me.

As winter turned to spring and now summer, I’ve had a lot of space to think and feel. Even my research at UW over the summer, which has been focused on the cobalt mining frenzy in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the level of suffering that has been leveled against the Congolese people to power the transition to EVs, has been a reckoning with loss, and our capability of destruction of our natural environments, while relishing in the absolute wonder and beauty of life—be it human, plant, animal, land, rivers, or any other living thing. It’s been complicated. This year has felt less like a grief sandwich and more of a complicated swirl of elation and body shaking sobs. With each new day, I wonder if this is the day I stop, that I have cried it all out and there’s nothing left, and that’s usually right when I start up again.

What does it mean to grieve? And what can it teach me about letting go?

There have been many wonderful things the past year. New friends like Tobi, Michelle, Michel & Brian, Marcus, Erin, the Fletcher sisters, and others who I met on a random 4^th of July party, but truly became friends over the winter when I hosted weekly soup nights at my place. These friendships have buoyed me through this year. And perhaps the most important of these has been the deepening of my friendship with Yagmur who has been essential to not only my growth as a writer but as a human being. We don’t see each other much but we frequently call, sometimes it feels like every day because there is always something new that happened or a lesson we learned.

Over the past few months, we’ve talked earnestly about letting go. We are both having a simultaneous question. Can we ever let go of the people we loved? How do you let go? What does that even look like?

Since landing on this topic, I have asked everyone from my friends to professors what they know about letting go and I’m struck by how few answers they have—even those decades older than myself.

It seems that, for everyone I have asked, they are still figuring out what it means. When I ask the question, there are typically two responses. A lack of recognition or a dry laugh, followed by an admission. This is as far as I’ve come, I don’t know if I have answer for you.

It worries me, but it also fills me with a sense of curiosity. Like I’m putting on my investigator cap and grabbing a magnifying glass.

This brings me to the final portion of my update.

Many of you have expressed curiosity of when the next episode of my Juneau story will come out. Since it has been four months since my last essay, you’ll be glad to know that I have not abandoned this task during that time. In the past couple months alone, I have spent near every day working on it. As of today, I am perhaps a month from finishing the first draft and it is only once I work through it all the way through that I will be able to let it out into the world.

There is something else, too. M made me promise to share the story with her if I ever wrote it (that was four years ago), and I can’t share it with you until she does and gives her consent to do share it with you. I guess you could say that this is a developing story.

In regard to grief, I have been surprised by the level of feeling that has rushed through me in these past months writing this story. Many times, I have felt like something deep inside me was squeezing my lungs in its fists. I’m surprised by the way these memories have taken my breath away. How all of the sudden my eyes go blurry and my body knots up. I’m running through tissues faster than any flu season I’ve ever had. Yet, despite these now nearly ritualistic sessions, I feel lighter and more at peace than ever in my life. I know I’m not done. I’m not sure it will be over when I’m done writing, but I do feel closer to whatever letting go is supposed to be. For me, it has been a return to these moments and letting myself feel all the things I didn’t allow myself to feel then. All the raging, cringy, crushing, or elated moments that my life with M contained.

It is remembering how the love of a specific woman and the wildness of Alaska got me started on a winding path that has led all the way back to me. To the person I always wanted to be but didn’t know how to become. Without it, I don’t think I would be writing to you. I’m not sure if I would be around to think about telling you how it saved me.

It is remembering how, when M left for California, I put all of my feelings about our relationship in a box and didn’t open it for years. I wasn’t ready. Perhaps, there is no right amount of time to wait before unfreezing a moment, to let it melt and wash right through. Maybe you just know when you know. That is me now. Thawing out a memory of a love that saved me, a story I kept on the wall and told my friends, Look, this is where I was born again. But I hadn’t mourned. I kept everything in cold storage until the day I could face it, and that day is here and now.

To top it all off, I had an unexpected change in plans for this summer break at the end of August and I’ve decided to return to the place it all began. I feel it calling me from the north and I am as anxious as I am excited. After almost five years away, I can’t wait to tell you what Alaska teaches me this time.

And I guess that’s it for now.

Since it will be a while until I can continue sharing my Juneau story with you, I plan to share other stories—whatever comes up during the week or the moments that surprise me this as I navigate this summer. Be they papers I’ve written during my time at UW, moments with friends, or thoughts that I’m working through. I’ll try to get back writing you weekly because I’ve missed you, too.

I’ll see you then.