The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

by Brianna Wiest

you cannot force something out of your brain space, no matter how much you don’t want it to be there. You cannot simply loosen your grip, relax a little, and will yourself to stop thinking entirely about something around which your entire world used to orbit. This is not how it goes. You are not going to let go the moment someone tells you to “move on,” the day you realize you have to admit certain defeat, the heart-dropping second it occurs to you that hope is, indeed, futile. You do not let go by simply willing yourself not to care anymore. This is something that people who have never been really, really hung up on something would assume. This is something that people who have never been deeply attached to something for a sense of safety and security and love and their future believe. There is nothing wrong with you because you almost get angry when people tell you to just “let go” so nonchalantly, as though they couldn’t fathom the storms in your head and heart. How can you become so passive about something you have spent so much of your time in your life actively working to maintain and then restore? You can’t, and you don’t.