I'm standing at the side of a trail in California,
And the hikers are passing by me,
And I cannot move.
Not because I don't want to,
Because my foot won't let me.
I've been off the trail for four days now.
I've iced it,
Elevated it,
Taken more painkillers than I should have,
And I told myself every morning that today will be the day that I can go back on the trail,
Walking from California,
From Mexico,
All the way to Canada.
And today,
I will be okay.
My husband is somewhere ahead of me,
Somewhere on the trail that we spent over a year preparing for.
The trail that was supposed to be our way of processing everything.
Six years of fertility treatments,
Every injection,
Every scan,
Every two-week wait,
Every email that said,
You're not pregnant again.
We had planned this hike as our way of saying goodbye to the life we had hoped for,
And walking toward whatever came next.
And I was sitting on the side of a road,
And I couldn't walk in hiking clothes I could not justify wearing,
Holding onto a plan that was already gone.
My name is Rianna,
And thank you for listening to this.
And I want to share this because this is the thing I did not understand until that moment,
Because I had spent six years trying to let go of the dream,
Of the loss,
Of the future that didn't happen.
And I had done all the things you are supposed to do.
I processed it,
I talked about it,
I understood it.
I had even built a plan that was specifically designed to mark the end of it.
That was this,
A physical,
Literal walking forward.
Being there was a dream come true,
But the struggle was hard because four months before our start date,
After all training and preparation,
Mentally,
Physically,
Emotionally,
I had stepped off a sidewalk,
Misstepped,
And torn my ligament completely,
Which meant that I walked on crutches for multiple weeks,
And the recovery had just started when the start date was there.
And you know,
Sitting there on the side of the trail,
I realized that none of it had worked.
You know,
It felt like another round of grief.
And the weight of the loss that I actually wanted to process on the trail was still there,
Completely intact,
As heavy as the day it started three years before.
So I wanna talk about why,
Because I think most people who are trying to let go of something are doing exactly what I was doing.
And I think that is why it's not working for you either.
The assumption most of us carry into this is that letting go means not caring anymore,
That the measure of success is the absence of feeling,
That if you have truly released something,
It won't hurt to think about it.
You will be able to talk about it with distance,
With neutrality,
Without anything catching in your chest.
And every time you still feel something,
You decide you have failed.
You decide you are weak.
You decide you're just someone who cannot let go.
You're not failing.
You're trying to do something that is not actually possible.
You cannot make yourself stop caring about something that was real to you.
You cannot think your way out of a feeling you have never actually let yourself have.
And here's the thing that took me the longest to understand.
You cannot walk away,
Or walk from Mexico all the way to Canada,
From something you have not faced.
The hike was never going to fix it,
Because I had been trying to let go of the event,
The loss,
The thing that happened,
Without ever touching what was actually underneath it,
The identity.
The version of me that had been building toward motherhood since I was seven years old,
Helping my mom with my younger brothers,
At 12,
Caring for a neighbor's newborn the whole summer,
At 24,
Working as an au pair in Paris.
I had spent my whole life preparing for something that was not going to happen.
And the thing I was actually holding onto was not the treatments,
Or the embryos,
Or the positive tests that never came.
It was a story of who I was supposed to become.
A mom.
You know,
That is what most people are actually carrying.
Not the event,
But the story of who they were supposed to become.
The identity they built around it,
Or the identity that they had.
The relationship is gone,
But you're holding onto who you were when you were loved by that person.
The job ended,
But you're holding onto who you were when you had that role.
The dream did not happen,
But you're holding onto the version of your life that made sense when it was still possible.
That is a much harder thing to release than a single loss.
And this is the part nobody tells you about because nobody talks about identity grief.
We only talk about that thing that ended,
But we never talk about who ended with it.
And here's where the second problem lives,
Because most people try to let go without grieving first.
I was one of them.
I could explain my loss clearly to anyone who asked.
I did so many podcasts,
And I wanted to be a voice for the people going through this as well.
I had the language completely down.
What I had not done was feeling the full weight of it.
The part that does not make sense.
The part that cannot be articulated.
The part that is just sad,
Gone.
The absence of something that was supposed to be there.
Understanding is not the same as grieving,
And grief is not optional.
You cannot release something you have not allowed yourself to fully feel.
It does not matter how well you understand what happened.
The feeling waits.
It sits in the drawer you closed,
And at 2 a.
M.
It pops up.
Or a song that brings you back to that moment.
Or it surfers in the middle of a trill in California when you cannot move anymore.
I decided to text my husband that evening.
Three words.
I'm leaving.
It's still tearing me up because I remember that moment so well.
And it's not because I gave up.
It was the first honest thing I had said in weeks.
And that was the moment of stopping the performance,
Admitting that what I was going through was hard,
Was true,
Was painful.
And that is what letting go actually is.
It's not about caring less.
It's stopping the argument with what actually happened.
Not the if only,
Not the it should have been different,
Not the what if I had done more,
I tried harder,
I waited longer.
Those questions feel like they're helping,
But they're not.
They are the argument.
And the argument keeps you in the past,
Spending energy on a situation that is not going to change,
While your actual life is happening right now without you.
You cannot build anything new while your hands are still full of the old thing.
I want to leave you with a question and write it down if you can,
And be honest with yourself when you answer it.
What is the story you're telling about who you are because of what you lost?
So not what happened,
But who you decided you are because of it.
Because that's what you are actually holding.
And that is the first thing that needs to be named before anything can be released.
And see if you can finish this sentence.
I am still holding on to.
.
.
Don't explain it,
Don't justify it,
Don't judge it,
Just name it.
Acknowledging the situation is the first step.
If you want to do this work properly with structure and support for every layer of it,
If you click on my profile,
You can find my course,
How to Let Go,
A practical guide to releasing what holds you back.
And that is where we go all the way through it.
So I hope to see you there.
