What Autumn Can Teach Us About Letting Go
There is something strange about how beautiful autumn makes loss look. The leaves change slowly. The days get shorter almost imperceptibly. For a while, summer and fall seem to coexist—warm afternoons, cold mornings, green trees interrupted by flashes of red and yellow. And then, eventually, what was there is gone.
A recent Psychology Today article about the psychology of autumn made an observation I particularly liked: a leaf doesn't turn red one morning and fall that afternoon. Letting go takes time.
People do, too.
We Have Strange Expectations About Moving On
In therapy, people often worry that they are taking too long.
Why am I still thinking about this?
Why does this still hurt?
I know the relationship wasn't good for me. Why do I still miss them?
I thought I was over this.
Underneath these questions is often another one: Shouldn't I be somewhere else by now?
We tend to imagine psychological change as much more linear than it actually is. First we understand something. Then we accept it. Then we let it go. Then we move forward.
Except that isn't usually how it happens.
We understand and then forget. We accept and then protest. We feel ready to move forward and then desperately want what we had before.
Sometimes all of those things happen in the same afternoon.
Two Things Can Be True
One of the things I find most beautiful about autumn is that the new season doesn't immediately erase the old one.
There are warm days and cold nights. Green leaves and red ones. You can be excited to pull out a sweater and still feel sad when it gets dark at 6:00.
Our emotional lives work that way, too.
You can know that ending a relationship was necessary and still miss the person.
You can be excited about a new beginning and grieve what you had to leave behind.
You can love someone and be angry with them.
You can forgive someone and still not want them in your life.
You can know that something is over and not yet be ready for it to feel over.
These aren't necessarily contradictions that need to be resolved. Sometimes they are simply different parts of our experience that need enough room to exist together.
Letting Go Isn’t One Decision
We often talk about letting go as though it is an event.
We picture finally deleting the number, throwing away the photographs, forgiving the parent, accepting the divorce, leaving the job, or deciding that we are done.
Those moments can matter.
But most letting go is considerably less cinematic.
It happens when you notice that you haven't replayed the conversation in three days.
When you tell the story differently than you did six months ago.
When something that once felt unbearable feels sad instead.
When you realize you no longer need someone to understand what they did to you in order for you to understand it yourself.
And sometimes, just when you think you've released something, you pick it back up again.
That doesn't necessarily mean you've gone backward.
Grief, attachment, disappointment, and change rarely disappear because we've arrived at the correct intellectual conclusion.
What Do We Keep
Letting go also doesn't mean leaving everything behind.
Every relationship changes us. So does every home, every friendship, every version of ourselves we've inhabited.
Even painful experiences can leave us with things we want to keep—not because we're grateful they happened, but because they became part of us.
Maybe we learned what we need.
Maybe we discovered what we will no longer tolerate.
Maybe someone introduced us to music we still love.
Maybe an old friendship gave us a version of ourselves that we miss and want to find again somewhere else.
Moving forward doesn't require declaring the past worthless.
There Is No Deadline
The trees don't seem particularly concerned about whether they're changing quickly enough.
Some turn early. Some stay green long after everything around them has changed. Some lose their leaves almost overnight.
We are allowed to be more like that.
There are seasons in life when change comes quickly and others when we live for a long time in the in-between.
Therapy can help us understand what we're holding onto and why. Sometimes it helps us let go. Sometimes it helps us discover that we aren't actually ready to.
And sometimes the work isn't making ourselves move forward at all.
It's learning to stay with ourselves while change is already happening.