Let Go

This week’s essay could have been just seven words—a sentence a colleague and friend wrote on a postcard during a leadership class, as we helped one another navigate planning for the future:

Let yourself grow into being cared for.

It’s powerful on its own. And many of us need to see those words, not just with our eyes, but with our whole selves—so let’s go slow.

Let yourself.
Let yourself grow.
Let yourself grow into being.
Let yourself grow into being cared for.
Cared for.

Control has been my safety net for as long as I can remember. If I stay out in front of everyone, I can manage the feelings and outcomes (theirs and mine): good, bad, indifferent.

I’ve used extreme control to navigate the world for years. Like so many of the strategies we teach ourselves to survive, it works… until it doesn’t.

Eventually, you reach a place where surviving is no longer the goal. And so, the strategy must change.

Control, it turns out, is a gatekeeper. It keeps serendipity at a distance. It blocks the care that rearranges and brings us into new parts of ourselves.

In recent years, I’ve found myself craving softer places to land. Gentler ways to exist. And I’ve had to meet myself in the mirror and ask:

What are you willing to release to receive the softness you long for?

Because softness won’t flow through clenched hands.
It needs open palms.

When I held that postcard, I knew I was holding someone’s care for me. At that moment, care looked like accountability from someone giving me the charge to open the road for something new.

I’ve been wearing armor that no longer fits. Forged long ago to protect me from a kind of reciprocal care that is sacred, abundant, and real.

The kind of care that doesn’t flinch at my limitations.
The kind that is rooted in self-trust, nurtured every time I show up for myself as my first caretaker.

Now, I find myself standing naked at the crossroads.
Between who I’ve been and who I might become—
Now that the armor is falling away.