The Art Of Letting Go

Lucas wanted to be free—this wasn't going to happen today.

After throwing a tantrum at his therapist for poking too deep into his trauma, he went out in a flair, stalking the streets with his heavy-set shoulders and deep frowns that frightened other people surrounding him, causing them to give him a wide berth. Lucas was a big man, who could tower over an average person easily, making him always feel like a giant among dwarfs. It was different when he had been in his basketball team in high school, where everybody had the similar or the same body size, but he was no longer in high school, and instead was nearing his thirties, still throwing tantrums like a kid that he no longer was.

As he moved without being aware of where he was going, he reran the dialogue he had with his therapist, and out of burst of frustration and anger redirected towards his therapist, he ran, exerting his legs as much as he could. He ran and ran, and a part of him imagine that if he could run fast enough, he would be able to fly, like how airplanes started to fly after running on the tracks. But he wasn't a bird nor was he an airplane, so he stayed on the ground, running until he was out of breath. He collapsed on the ground, heaving as he looked down, staring at the tar ground.

Now that he exhausted all his pent-up energy gained from anger, he could at least think rationally about what he did to Dr. John. And while he was still angry and still prone to insulting his therapist, a small part of him started to feel guilty at his harsh reaction.

"I can't believe I just did that." He sighed as he rubbed his face. He looked around him, and he suddenly realized that he was in front of a gate, which guarded a graveyard where his uncle was buried in. Lucas' heart thumped a little faster, and his legs were itching to run away—here lied the one man he let down, the one man he couldn't even see before the man died from cancer. Lucas' uncle was the one family member that cared for him even when most would have given up, and if there was one thing he regretted, it was not being able to show to his uncle how much he truly was truly thankful for it.

Despite of feeling guilty, Lucas pushed himself to move forward, opening his gate as a part of him whispered that he could still avoid doing this. But Lucas spent all his life running, whether from his dysfunctional parents or from his emotions, or even now, from his therapist. If he ran now, he would truly run forever. His feet trembled slightly at first, but gradually he gained a traction and moved with purpose towards his uncle's grave. The gravestone had a marble sheen to it, and he touched it, hoping for something that he couldn't put a name to. Then he brushed away the wet leaves that cluttered his uncle's grave and sat down on the wet ground, breathing in the musty humid air deeply into his lungs.

In or out of prison, Lucas' uncle was the only one who stayed along his side, whether it was by telling his friends who were prison guards to look after Lucas or by giving him a roof over his head when Lucas came out of prison. Although Lucas knew his uncle had cared then, Lucas hadn't been able to trust him completely, preferring to trust his prison friends or his other crooked friends who smoke crack and swear and insulted their own mothers.

That led to multiple prison sentences for small felonies, and a part of Lucas was ashamed to say that he did it because he had company in the prison, and he wanted to be with them more than being outside. In an ironic way, Lucas had come to see these prison friends as family, when all along, he had one already who cared for him in an almost unconditional manner. Needless to say, Lucas wasn't surprised that except for one, the rest lost contact with him when he decided to pick his life up and make something out of it.

Lucas leaned against the gravestone, again trying to feel for something he had no name for, only to feel a dull emptiness in his chest. The anger from before receded, making him more rational about what happened before wit Dr. John. Dr. John was a great therapist, something that took Lucas few years to truly admit out loud. As a boy with a father who was a violent alcoholic and a mother who tried to ignore everything that happened at home, it was both difficult to trust and difficult to admit that he needed help, especially from somebody he was paying money to, who he initially thought was only doing the job for the money. 

Dr. John wasn't the only person he had difficulty trusting initially, but also his girlfriend, Janet, who had difficult times persevering through her relationship with him (which was a testament to her strength of will to stay with Lucas—who had issues of his own that would have made many women run away). Sometimes Lucas couldn't help but wonder why people kept up with him relentlessly, despite the many times he was willing to give up on himself.

When Lucas first went into therapy, he had thought therapy was about talking, and some philosophical bullshit. But it was much more than that—Dr. John had to actively find ways to help him venture into his own memories and pain, using EMR or many other methods that seemed unworkable at first, but it had an effect that helped Lucas progress to where he was today.

But while he could now handle some of the more painful memories he used to hide from himself and look at his parents' negligence and abuse as a past he was no longer in, there were still many issues he was not aware of, pangs of pain he still felt and anger that could be triggered by the most unexpected thing. This time, this therapy session had brought him over that edge between calmness and anger, though this time he truly lost control of himself, like he had let go of the car steering wheel as he was heading into a crash.

He curled up at the memory, finally feeling the full depth of his guilt that overpowered his anger. He shouldn't have done that. No, he wasn't supposed to do that. He was in therapy for so many years; he should have been better by now, where most of the issues should have been solved. That was how Lucas felt when he first learned to truly look at his past as the past rather than something that followed him like a ghost into the present.

But the more he solved the issues that he and Dr. John found, the more he found them. And each time he found an issue, he learned that another foreign emotion that he had either long forgotten or learned to ignore in the rhythm of violence, anger and daily life. Yet they were always buried somewhere in his heart, in his body, in his head—everywhere on his physical body. He may look big and strong, but Lucas knew that there was a young boy in him that was still afraid.

And to reach out to there made the other part of him rebel, simply because he wasn't comfortable with feeling vulnerable, with feeling inadequate as a human being with all the issues that seemed immeasurable. Who was he exactly? Was he defunct all along, and he would never find true peace? As time passed, he grew frustrated, and all these frustrations turned to silent anger, only waiting for the right time to be unleashed.

A combination of silent anger and the loathing of being vulnerable had made him throw a tantrum then in the therapy session earlier. No matter how much he trusted Dr. John, he wasn't able to dispel the idea that vulnerability was dangerous in itself, because it was the single moment that people could manipulate you and break you apart even if you were usually strong.

Lucas was one of those people who knew that anything could be broken apart provided you knew how, and thus he never knew how to trust in things that were strong and present now, for the fear of them leaving him easily in the near future. It was a lesson he had to keep learning, a lesson that he failed to completely understand and digest into his fearful mind. And sometimes he felt like it was a lesson he could never completely master.

Lucas looked above, craning his head towards the sky. The sun was out this time, but rain started to drizzle again, caressing his skin.

He breathed in the smell of light rain, grass and the earth, feeling it touch his lungs in an intimate manner. It settled an air of calm in his heart, though the undercurrents in his heart was ever violent. There was no sound, except for the occasional sound of shuffle, most likely from the squirrels moving from tree to tree, or the birds in the trees, chirping to each other in a language one could never hope to learn. 

It was moments like this when Lucas felt both calm and chaotic at the same time, stuck in both his own inner world and yet vaguely aware of the world outside of him, a world he wanted to fully enter in but could not for some reason. He was a foreign element in the world that seemed to go on peacefully forward, unperturbed by what had happened yesterday or a year before. When he started his therapy with Dr. John, the one thing he learned about trauma was how it isolated you from the world, leaving you unable to fully form the human connections to feel accepted into a world.

But he would add that the more human connections you are prevented from having, the more you stop becoming human. Although it was difficult to digest initially, Lucas believed that being human was being able to be vulnerable with people who you can trust. In a way, recovering was a process of becoming human again.

To turn from unhuman to human was a difficult process for Lucas. It meant dismantling the wrong beliefs, wrong conceptions of the world and repeatedly faced with a single question: was he going to let go? Was he going to let go of who he was completely, or was he going to keep some part of who he was? And if it was the latter, what parts of him was he going to keep? After all these years of therapy, Lucas came to a semi-confirmed answer: there were parts of him he could let go; there were other parts which he could not, even if he wanted to and there were other parts of him that he did not want to let go, even if he could.

Forgiving his parents was one of those things he had refused to do. Before Lucas began therapy, he was constantly berated by Janet to forgive his parents in order to start healing. But Lucas was never comfortable with the idea, and although he knew Janet hadn't meant it, it had actually made him less motivated to help himself and more shameful of himself in his unwillingness to do that one thing. Eventually he told Dr. John about it, and Dr. John told him that forgiveness wasn't prerequisite to getting better. It made him feel more at ease and more accepting of himself for this one thing he wasn't willing to do.

After Janet heard about what Dr. John said, she accepted that it wasn't necessary as she thought, even though she had encouraged it sometimes. He knew Janet wasn't being insensitive, but because she felt like that was the only way for Lucas to truly move on from the past and truly be free and happy. To not forgive was to hold a certain amount of negativity, and she hadn't want him to hold onto any of it into his present time.

But Lucas didn't think it was possible to ever not carry some negativity from the past, or some type of burden. As Dr. John said, you could never erase the effect of the past completely, but you could learn to live with it and build a life that you would be happy with. He still struggled sometimes to believe that he could truly build a better life out of the shambles he was in, and his earlier outburst made him less confident again.

It wasn't that Lucas couldn't forgive—he always thought he could if he truly gave it a shot at it. But he didn't want to, because no matter how much he understood how everybody is human and how his parents, as dysfunctional and horrible as they were, had their own stories to why they became the way they are, the young boy in him still had suffered at their hands and was helpless in protecting himself. That young boy in him wasn't willing to forgive his parents. And his mature, understanding side wasn't that willing either—he found that he was rather protective of that younger boy inside him, a protective side that understood instinctively how much he had went through, how much life struggles he had gone through simply because two adults were not willing to take care of him.

It was nasty to some people, but it was this part of him he wasn't willing to let go. Out of all things he was willing to change, this was the part of him he kept, because it formed the crux of who he really was—somebody who grew to hate seeing people get hurt, because the people around him are not caring or loving enough to protect who they should. And this was the single part of him that he loved about himself—there was already enough things that he hated himself for without adding another one on top.

In a way, Lucas and Janet complemented each other—while Lucas didn't forgive those who hurt him intimately and those who hurt his loved ones, Janet could forgive those who hurt her, even in the most intimate ways. That was why she could even keep up with him, because she was able to repeatedly forgive him and support him even when she was hurting a lot more from the rejections and problems he gave her.

Even though they came from different backgrounds, Janet was always curious, always willing to learn what it was like to grow up in a home like his, how it was like to have life experiences such as his. Sometimes when she heard about how his parents behaved, she would press her lips together, as if she was trying to understand. One day, she came to him, and she admitted something that was an antithesis to who she was—"I wasn't sure if I would be able to forgive people like your parents if I was brought up with them."

"But you managed to forgive your parents. And even me," he added the last phrase playfully, but he frowned at Janet's change of heart. Janet's parents were strict, very demanding and at times they said things to her that may be considered by some as emotional abuse.

"That's true. But I had the comfort that at least they had loved me, even if they sometimes didn't do it in a way that helped me. You didn't." She took his hands into hers. "And for you, I always knew that you did your best and that even if you were horrible to handle at times, you love me."

Perhaps love was a factor that people think about when comes to forgiveness—it was easier to forgive somebody who meant good will for you over somebody who meant bad will for you. They were silent after that conversation, and Lucas admitted that he mulled over whether he could forgive somebody who meant well but also hurt him badly. Truthfully, he didn't know nor did he want to know.

Lucas took his phone out, and as the phone rang, the voice came on. "Hello."

"Janet." He breathed out.

"What's wrong?" They were together for long enough to know each other's breaths and intonations.

"Nothing. Just wanted to call you. How's work?"

She mulled. "Everything is fine so far. There is some cheesecake in the fridge. Do you want me to bring them home? I think you'll love it." Lucas always felt better after eating something delicious—something that Janet teased him for.

"it's not strawberry flavored, right?"

"Of course not. It's blueberry."

"Okay. I'll come back earlier then."

She was silent before she asked, in quiet voice. "Is everything alright?"

He sighed. "Just a bit of a rough day."

"Dr. John?"

"The usual stuff."

"It sounds more intense than usual."

"It is."

"I'll cook something nicer then. What would you like?"

"So you would only cook something nice for me when I'm like this?" He couldn't help but tease her. It also lightened up his mood.

She laughed. "I'll cook any time you want, you greedy man."

"I can be greedy if I want—you are my girlfriend."

"Yeah, yeah, I have to go back to work."

"You can't give more time to your boyfriend over your work?"

"Geez." She laughed again, her voice like wind bells to him. "You can have all my time when I get back. Now leave me alone."

"Ok. Love you."

"Love you too."

After calling Janet, he looked down at his phone, mulling over his next choice. Calling Janet was to give him back his equilibrium, to make him more settled down. Now that he was more clear-minded, he tried to fight back against the nervousness as he called the next person.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Dr. John."

"Oh, Lucas. How are you feeling now?"

Even after so many years with Dr. John, he still couldn't understand how Dr. John can be so calm with raging, emotional patients like him.

"I'm sorry for what I did before."

"Ah." There was a brief pause. "I think I told you before that this is part of therapy, right?"

"Yes. But I'm still sorry for doing that. I shouldn't have done that."

"It's okay. It sometimes can get out of hand. We can talk about why you reacted that way the next session. Don't blame yourself too much, okay?"

He scratched his head. "Don't blame myself, huh?"

"I'm serious. Don't blame yourself for being human, Lucas."

Lucas repeated the word in his head. Human. It hadn't registered in his mind before that he genuinely believed that he wasn't quite human, wasn't quite the same as the rest of the world, even after having Janet, some good friends and a good support system. It was until here that he realized—yes, he was human, even if he was cut off from the world once. As much as he could be violent and cold, he could be warm and loving. This was the duality of humanity—and it was hard to ever realize it until one had stood on both sides.

"Ok."

He could hear the smile in the therapist's voice. "You are finally willing to learn to be less harsh on yourself."

"Have I?"

"The you before would have given me thousands of reasons to why you should blame yourself repeatedly."

He couldn't help but laugh. "It was rather irritating to hear them."

"It can be. Remember, Lucas. Healing takes time."

"Got it."

"Good. Now I have to attend to my next client as much as I want to continue speaking."

"Okay. Thank you, Dr. John."

"No problem." The phone cut off there, and Lucas stood up, as he dusted off the grass that stuck to his buttocks.

He looked around, and then towards the gravestone where his uncle lied. He had committed horrible mistakes; one being not visiting his uncle before he passed away. He touched the gravestone again, and he whispered an apology. Yes, he would forever carry the burden of his mistakes, but the best way to ever make it up was live a proper life. It was to live a life his uncle would have been proud for, a life that Janet and Dr. John would be happy to see.

He was no longer the lone man who faced the world—there were people around him that would pick him up when he needed to be picked up and that even if he lashed out due to vulnerability, they were able to see that in him. Even though a part of him knew this for a long time, it only settled into him fully now.

This was what healing was about, Lucas realized. There would always be times where his old self would fight the changes he tried to implement or old beliefs would come back and haunt him, dispelling the new beliefs or giving him the same old insecurities. To become somebody that he could be proud of was to win the war with his old, untrusting self. 

And it was a long battle, where if he thought he would lose and give up, he would truly lose the war. Not only today, but he had to keep fighting the war every other day—until one day he realized his old self was so far behind that it no longer haunted him like how it had always been doing so. Today he won one battle—the next would be battle that would be unexpected, but he would survive and win it. He had to—and he would.

Change is a constant in life, taking its pace to instill it into one's soul and body. What you were yesterday is not necessarily what you are today. He would take his time, and he would keep trying to get better, even if he could not be better in every department of his life and even if he kept a part of him that most people disliked. But that would be alright, because he had somebody who loved him even at his worst, and would be happy enough to know that he changed enough for him to be happy with himself.

And that was enough to be free.