Letting go

What did you let go of this year? Whom did you let go?

This year I left my job to spend 6 months doing 'nothing', rest, rediscover myself and enjoy.  Its been one of the hardest things I have ever done.  I thought that being on a kind of vacation from my life as I knew it would be the most wonderful thing ever.  And, 6 months later I can certainly agree that it has brought about wonderful results and I am very happy, but those first 3 months were difficult!

I would not have admitted before my hiatus that so much of my identity was caught up in my work and what I did.  I thought I had a fairly balanced outlook and attitude.  But giving away that identify caused me to go in to a depression, not serious, but I was there.  You see, I no longer had a clear purpose on an every day level.  I could get up in the morning, or not get up, and do what?  For the first month or so I found plenty of things to do, catching up on life, doing all those things you put off because they are not-that-important that you want to take time off work to do them.  But after that I was lost.  People asked me when they met me what I did and I would tell them I was on a kind of sabbatical.  Everyone accepted that, but then came the inevitable follow up question: what will you do next?

Actually I still do not know the answer to that, but the process of losing all my attachment to my old self has been a really intense learning curve.  I have had to re-examine what is really important to me, what provides me with a sense of achievement and the most difficult one of all, leaning on another.  You see my husband choose to support me in this venture.  As a pretty feisty, independent woman it was a further challenge to be financially reliant on my husband.  Learning to be OK with that was one of the hardest parts of all.  There was so much self judgement involved.  Lazy, parasite, money not being 'earned'... Yikes, there were so many parts of that.  Just accepting that he loves me and wants the best for me and this was his gift to me, well, I am still struggling a bit with it.

Clearly the answer to this question about what I have let go of this year is much longer than this exercise requires.  So to summarise I have let go of so much: most of my job related ego, my self judgement around not working, my sense of self related to my work, my understanding that my value as a person is linked to my earning abilities, my wardrobe of conservative European business suits and impractical shoes... So many things.  And what am I left with?  At this point its a clean slate, ready to start something new.  Please just don't ask me what it is!