a great description

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-10-2004
a great description
Fri, 05-27-2005 - 11:15pm

Hi everybody. I came to this board a lot last summer and fall when I was breaking up and getting back with an ex, over and over, quite the cycle. It was a very, very difficult time for me. I just read a short story by Alice Munro called "Bardon Bus" that includes a great description of the letting go process and I thought I'd share it:

"I am at a low point. I can recognize it. That must mean I will get past it. I am at a low point, certainly. I cannot deal with all that assails me unless I get help and there is only one person I want help from and that is X. I can't continue to move my body along the streets unless I exist in his mind and in his eyes. People have this problem frequently, and we know it is their own fault and they have to change their way of thinking, that's all. It is not an honorable problem. Love is not serious though it may be fatal. I read that somewhere and I believe it...

At the same time I'm thinking that I have to let go. What you have to decide, really, is whether to be crazy or not, and I haven't the stamina, the pure, seething will, for prolonged craziness.

There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it.

When you start really letting go this is what it's like. A lick of pain, furtive, darting up where you don't expect it. Then a lightness. The lightness is something to think about. It isn't just relief. there's a queer kind of pleasure in it, not a self-wounding or malicious pleasure, nothing personal at all. It's an uncalled for pleasure in seeing how the design wouldn't fit and the structure wouldn't stand, a pleasure in taking into account, all over again, everything that is contradictory and persistent and unaccomodating about life. I think so. I think there's something in us wanting to be reassured about all that, right alongside -- and at war with -- whatever there is that wants permanent vistas and a lot of fine talk."