These things that you feel like are killing you are just here to usher in the next phase of your life. Yes, it will feel like you are going to die or something you hold very dearly is going to slip through your grasp (or both), but those things to which you cling and believe essential to who you are were meant to be released.

You have already reinvented yourself many times before. That is what life is here to do – wrest from your grasp the things that are not yours, and are not who you are – over and over and over again. You were built to be free of accoutrements – your job, your stuff, even who you thought you were. Little did you know, those things that are slipping from your grip are just things that were encumbering you anyway.

In family therapy theory, we call these transitions where we are forced to let go of something  developmental “nodes.” They are points where the direction of your life changes – and when you find out that what you thought your life was about it no longer is. I like to call them your little deaths, of which you will experience many until you finally arrive at your big death. That final death is yet another transition, and it was always your destiny. You were built to experience these transitions, but it still feels like dying every time.

What hurts is you will no longer be able to see things the same way. Your view of yourself will change and your view of the world will change. You will no longer be able to rely on the things that propped you up before. Those are just the things you thought defined you, but they have actually kept others from seeing the true you. When you learn this practice of letting go, you will rise up unencumbered. It makes me wonder what took me so long every time.

The big death is when you will lay everything down. Your little deaths on the way to that are just trying to help offload some luggage ahead of time. You might as well give some of your stuff away before you die. You will die naked and penniless. That is how it was always supposed to be. You came into this world with nothing, and you will leave it just the same.

I know it all sounds very serious and dark, but what is much more suffocating is when we tighten our grip on the things that are actually killing us. The letting go of them is freeing. There is this point we reach when working through our trauma where we must release ourselves into helplessness. That feels like death because our instincts are to hold on to every shred of strength we have to make ourselves survive. Just let go. At that moment when you feel like you are about to lose your life, you find a new one.