Farewell 2021

January 01, 2022 / Melissa Archer

This year, I suffered a tremendous or what feels like tremendous amount of loss. Death, a break up, business break ups, and I thought for a minute I might break up with my career. At times I felt beaten down and overwhelmed, yet somehow through it all I still got up, still searched for my silver lining or even a fresh perspective. I can’t find joy in death, but I can feel comforted that my dad and my uncle are in God’s loving care now. What I lost in a romantic relationship, I gained an even stronger friendship, what changed in my business ventures freed me for other interests and brought new unexplored paths that call to my adventurous heart, and what I thought I didn’t want in my career which I thought would end it, I realized I still want it, but with new perspective and a complete change in goals. And let’s not forget, there were some pretty incredible things that happened as well. I have a lot to be grateful for, but for this I want to focus on the harder times because sometimes we need a little extra help when it comes to that. I know I do.

You see…loss is hard, but as Kerry Washington’s character from “Little Fires Everywhere” says something like how when there’s a brush fire it removes the necessary layer and allows for new growth. She also says people are resilient and can come back from total devastation - that we find a way. This resonated with me. I mean, yes, we all fall and sometimes really low, but we mostly seem to find our way back up. Sometimes when we get back up - we are different - renewed - a phoenix emerging from the fire.

The stuff that tears us up the most, even the relationships that test us the most, they are what brings us to the next level of our life. We learn from these things, what to do and what not to do, how to love, how to disagree, how to compromise, how to...

Something I learned recently - an epiphany if you will - something triggered my fight/flight instincts and it made sense when my therapist pointed out that my mind had put up a layer of protection of constant alertness so that I could stop an incoming threat or escape it. When I realized how the brain still lived in a place of the past, as though the threat was current, it explained why I might jump a little more, hear the scurry of a squirrel and search for an attacker, see a stranger walking toward me and want to be ready for defense. This high alert mentality was constantly keeping me overly sensitive to things that were not an actual threat. Like the brain was saying “just in case, go go go go”. So with a little work, you can start to minimize that and eventually get the amygdala back to its normal state.

The epiphany came when I realized we do this high alert dance even when there’s been no real life threat. I don’t know the science and if it’s the amygdala again, but this is what I noticed…that NEED to know. I can take every interaction I encounter and copy the memory into my miscellaneous filing cabinet in the brain. Then if another encounter takes place and my brain doesn’t connect the memories to something sequential and makes sense, it will start the high alert. It will watch every movement, every inflection, think about every thought process, and analyze the information 100 fold. It will put pieces together - often right or darn close - and the only part it gets wrong sometimes are the gaps that it makes up when those pieces are not available. It often thinks the worst. And I finally realized why. The brain remembers emotional pain from the past. When it experiences a trigger or even gets put on high alert for something else, it wants to have all the possible outcomes played out and plotted so that if protection or escape is necessary, I’ll be able to do so. It perceives the threat of getting emotionally hurt almost as bad as it sensing a wild animal approaching. But here’s the awful truth…the knowing doesn’t protect me. It doesn’t even always help me. Sometimes there are things that wouldn’t even be emotionally painful to walk through, but it has deemed it tragic pending. Now if it’s a truth I find that leads me to a healthy place of knowledge so that I can make better decisions, then it works out great. If it keeps me from being persuaded to go against my instincts and walk into harm, then of course it’s perfect. If it helps me discern, then great. But when it sends me into a spiral of needing to know just because….then that’s when it causes more harm than good. If I think I need to figure it out first before the other shoe drops or I’m made a fool - I’m probably making it harder on myself.

I realized I even do this with my faith. There are times when I’m in a complete investigative mode, just because I want to understand things to a degree of certainty otherwise I might be wrong and the sky will collapse on my head. But the truth is, I will never know it all. It’s good to study, research, learn, but it’s also good to accept there are some things I’m just not going to know. This “protective control” (I just made that up) is best met with asking for help to let it go. For me, that’s asking God. I ask Him to take it out of my head and help me lean into trusting that I’ll be okay even if the outcome sucks. To trust that sometimes, when it’s not a life or death situation, it’s best to hold strong in my decisions and let the rest play out how it will. Even if I do all my duty and find the thing I’m searching for, I might find it and allow it to cause me shame instead of realizing there’s no reason to have that shame.

So for you, my hope is that in 2022, if you’ve struggled with this need to know protective control, that isn’t there because of true life threat or necessary discernment, that you will find a way. Take a long walk and meditate, pray, or whatever you do to release, and you lay that control down. Give yourself permission to let it go. Give yourself permission to not know the ending and just rest in faith that what will be will be and you will be okay. I think this is what people feel who say that don’t care what others think and seem to be fairly confident in their decisions. Or maybe control isn’t their weakness. Maybe their need to know works only when it needs to actually work. But if you’re like me, ready for the impending threat at all times, find a way to let go of the ones that don’t matter.

One last tip…it’s an old trick a therapist once taught me…if you can’t let it go, walk yourself through the worst case scenario. Let your mind and body feel what that would be like. Imagine your worst fear with that situation. All the way down to the where you can’t even think of anything worse. Then evaluate - will it kill you? Will you “knowing” help you actually prevent a bad outcome, or will you “knowing” just mean that you have even more time to watch a bad outcome play out because you can’t fix and now you know too soon? Think about those and if your answer is something you think you can live with….then give that a chance and let it unfold as it may.