Why Letting Go Is So Hard: The Emotional Weight of Ending a Goal, Habit, or Identity

Hello, my friends. This week, let's talk about letting go. Letting go of opinions, ideas, activities, goals, and why it is so freaking hard to do it even when we know it's time, even when we've decided it would be better for us.

Let's talk about it because it's a universal human experience and...

I think for me, I really want to let go of a lot of stress. I want to let go of a lot of excess responsibility.

And sometimes I know I shouldn't even have it and it's not even mine to do, but it's really difficult to let go of my ownership or my responsibility of things and let someone else do or let things just rest and be.

So let's talk about it because I have some feelings and I'm sure you do too.

Let's see. Have you ever been working on a project and you're going about it how you normally do. And you start to have the sensation of "I know this isn't working. But I don't want to give up on this." I don't want to give up on the way that I'm doing it. I know how I'm doing it. I know that this is how to do it. And it's just frustrating and it's starting to build up resentment.

In moments like that when I'm working on projects and realizing like, oh my god, I've just spent five years of my life building this up and trying to create this thing, and this is how I know it works and it's been doing so well up until now and then you come up against a wall and you realize

Is it still working so well? Why isn't it working so well?! It's so frustrating, and one of the first things that comes up for me is, well, I've spent so much time.

I've invested so much of my energy into this. I need to make it work. So it starts being like...

Forcing and trying to prove that if you just keep doing the same thing harder, it will somehow get jammed into place and get better because it has to, because you feel like you need it to.

And then sometimes you're like, okay, well, what if I just backed off and walked away from the whole thing and thought of a new idea?

And it feels terrifying because you're like, well, what if I regret moving away and letting go? What if I was just about to succeed and it didn't succeed? Like there's so much fear of missing out.

And I feel that a lot in laying plans, feeling like, "if I do this for X amount of time, then reward should be Y" doesn't ever really quite work out that way. And sometimes it's about adjusting what my metrics are or what I'm even trying to get out of something. But other times there is a clear cut yes or no, like has this worked or has it not?

And no matter what it is, when it's time to bring something to an end, I find it sad and difficult and painful to let it go because I have this sense of identity around this. Like it becomes not just a goal or a habit, it's like who I think I am and how I've been being.

And if I have to change it, then who am I and what am I? I ran into that a lot at the end of tattooing, where it was a very abrupt end for me and it wasn't like on the schedule that I thought I was plotting.

It just was One day yes, next day no, now you're healing from an injury. Good luck.

And in that moment, letting go of an entire identity felt incredibly hard, disorienting, disappointing. I was disappointed in myself. I was disappointed in everything that I had believed in and I guess in a way no matter how big or small the thing is that you're letting go...

If it's as simple as like I'm letting go of going for walks every morning because it's starting to get cold out.

There is this tiny stab of you going like, well, then now what? Because that was how I did my days and now I don't know what to do next and I want it to be easier and I want to keep doing the same thing.

Because as a person embodied, I just like knowing what's happening next and not having to think about it. And I don't want it to have to be hard and I don't want it to change.

And we dislike that very much, or at least I do. I like things to very clearly let me know where they're going so I can adjust along the way and not have to have abrupt changes.

So there's always us struggling with negotiating with ourselves how okay we are with how much effort we have already put into something or even when we've had success.

This is really interesting. Even when you reach a goal and you're like, "Woo-hoo, I did it! I worked out like every day for the whole year and I went up this many weights and I have this muscle tone now and it's amazing and I've reached the size that I wanted in all of my clothing." There's like this anti-climax where you go, "Okay, I did it, and now what?"

Now I don't know what to do next. It always comes back to the same thing of, "I don't know what to do next."

I feel very distraught that everything that I've built my days and identity around doing and being has suddenly lost its meaning or its potency.

And there's just like this pressure to just keep going and weirdly to like move your goalposts. So I found when I was really concerned about weight loss and trying to figure out like how to be the healthiest me possible, I would reach where I thought I wanted to be and I'd still find some judgement about myself.

My belly is not flat enough. This isn't nice enough. I need more muscle. Maybe I could get an even lower BMI, like just weird things.

I would come into my head and I think it's because there was this discomfort and confusion for me around actually having gotten to the destination that I had hoped to be at, because I really had no road map of what to do once I got there. I just needed to get there.

So I was like, well, I know how I got here, so if I keep doing the same thing, I probably could go even farther down this path then it could, in my mind, I thought, get even better.

But eventually I realized, "No, pushing farther down this path doesn't make it even better. It just means now I've gone too far."

What do we do when we've reached a goal? How do we let go of the aspect of ourselves that had put in all this effort or gotten used to a certain level of activity or exertion mentally, physically, emotionally, and you get to the spot where you're like, "Okay, we're here," and now it's time to just be.

I find that very difficult. I think most of us find that really difficult. And I want to say that is completely normal and natural. Like we aren't really prepared for being very much.

We're often, often, often in society told where we're lacking and where we need to try harder and how great it could be if only we put in as much effort as everyone else did or this guy over here who found millionaire success through this exact method.

We're hearing it all the time. We're not hearing tales of people who just like had a happy life.

We're taught even to look down at that and be like, oh, all you did was get up and make breakfast for your family and then go to work and not try to push your career to the next level and make a gazillion dollars and invest in a time share and all these other things.

The person who doesn't have a lot to, I guess, brag about or talk about in that way, we tend to just dismiss or ignore or think like, "Oh, well, that's boring, whatever." But that person might be so much happier and more content than we are.

And we're passing by it because it's not as flashy and it's not the noise of what we're hearing every day.

So when we're realizing that something that we've been pushing towards or aspiring to be isn't working...

It isn't working for us. For whatever reason, it might even be like, "That was never aligned with my goals in the first place. Why ever was I trying to become a manager?" or whatever it is that you're realizing is out of alignment with yourself.

There's this sense of regret and "Well, now what?" and also "did I waste all of that time and effort and years because I hadn't realized what I realized now?"

And what I want to say is we're always growing.

We're always gonna look back and go, "Oh, if only I had known them what I know now, I would have saved so much time and effort and energy and I could have done this other thing."

How interesting it is that we fill it in with, I could have spent all that energy doing something else and moving towards a different goal. I think the conclusion that I've been coming to in life is no matter what we're working towards, we're going to find some point where it's either complete, we've made it to the goal - or we realize that the goal is un-aligned.

And as soon as we do that, we're gonna kind of pivot and want to do something else and move towards a new goal. What I think is missing sometimes is the ability
to just accept that that's a part of our nature as people, that it's okay.

To be driven, I guess, to have all of these ambitions, but it's equally okay and very important for us to have the capacity to hold ourselves in an in-between. And I think the autumn is a great in-between time.

It is a time where if you look out and nature animals are consolidating all of their stuff, like they have already gathered and eaten a lot and they're, you know, holding on to things for the winter.

They're slowing down. They're not necessarily as interactive with others.

And interestingly, I think this is what mirrors the frustration aspect that comes out when people are asking them to share, they start to be like, "No. No, I don't want to."

Like squirrels are not going to tell you where they've hidden all their stuff. It's for them. It's for later, please stop asking and I don't want to hang out. I see that mirrored in people as well.

Like we get to this time of year and we want to be social and share and prove that we're generous, wonderful people. But there's also this internal instinct of, please back off, I just need some time for myself. I need some space. Stop asking me for things. I just need to figure it out quietly without all of this, without all the hubbub.

So it's so interesting. There's like this grief around it too, this desire that we have to connect with other people and then we feel sad that sometimes we just want to push them away and have like, please just stop because I'm reassessing my entire life right now, everything. And I don't want you to judge me.

So I think maybe that's part of it too, is this fear we have of if we admit that we're in a transition space, that we might be judged, or that people might try to offer us something to do.

Here you go guys. I get so frustrated when I'm in this particular space of letting go of a direction and trying to come up with my next one or trying to just be in that in-between space and figure out, okay, what did work for me? What didn't work for me? Where do I want to go next? What is my next natural felt move? When I get input from someone telling me what they think I should do or what might help, it makes me so mad. I don't want to hear it.

So I'm not gonna offer that to you. I don't know what you need to do next. I don't know what you need to let go or what you're dealing with in any way.

The only thing I can offer is this sense of solidarity going, "Yeah, I know what it feels like to hit that and feel glad, sad; to feel confused, to feel that emptiness and feel so uncomfortable with it and not know how fast we're supposedly expected, I guess, to come up with our next thing or one we're supposed to announce it."

I don't like it and I am offering myself this year time.

Time to decide what the next move is and trust in myself because here's something I can tell you for sure.

With many years of experience and going through this so many times (and it's cyclical, so multiple times a year but particularly in the autumn moving into the winter)

When I decide that a certain segment is down or I've gone through the full cycle and experience of that year and I'm ready for a change and I'm ready to, I don't even want to say reinvent myself because I'm not reinventing. It's more of like this internal recalibration that's happening as I readjust and go, "Okay, I'm letting some things go." And that lets me move towards these other things.

I need to trust that I will always come up with something that I'm ready to do next.

I'm not going to be in the Hinterlands forever. I'm not going to be unsure of what to do next forever. There will come a time where I'm genuinely interested in someone else's opinion and have ideas of my own.

There will come a time where I wake up like a bolt totally inspired and ready to like sit down and write a novel or call a friend or I know what the next thing that I need to work on is.

It's always going to come. I don't have to fear that if I'm not desperately searching and throwing all of my energy into it constantly that it might not arise because it will.

And when I recognize that, and when you recognize that, it will allow you to have those moments to just go "Oh okay, I'm in the melancholy phase. I'm in the phase of having some regrets."

"I'm in the phase of just being mildly proud of myself or really proud of myself for a while and I don't have any desire yet to go do and change all of it just yet because I don't know what it is to just be where I am yet."

And be on this vista looking out and assessing what's going on. We need those moments of pause. It makes such a huge difference in how we feel and our capability.

I feel like taking these moments to just allow whatever feeling we're having about the loss of a goal or the change of a goal or letting go of something that we know we need to stop doing.

When we really let ourselves feel through that and have all of the emotions, which includes being angry, it includes being rageful, it includes being sad or scared, blank, confused, terrified, all of that, when we feel it.

We do get to the other side and it's like this kind of glorious blankness.

And that can be scary too. And then on the other side of that, there's inspiration.

And there's excitement and curiosity, and there's all of the pieces of us that we thought were lost forever because we had to let go of what we were before. But it exists, and it's there, and it's a part of you.

And sometimes we just need some time to allow that stuff to arise, to be able to really feel it.

I think when we get together next week, I want to talk about the aspect of this, which is about when we feel compelled to do some stuff, or we have inspiration to do things, and then there's the counterbalance of like, well, that just feels kind of pointless. I definitely experience that.

I know we all do, when you have direction that you're moving in and then you just realize that you've been stymied somehow. Like somehow forces have worked against you. It's difficult. Things are hard. Maybe it's a not-now situation and it's like this counterbalance between it being hard to let go. Sometimes it's hard to get moving and do stuff.

So let's talk about it because I think that we don't need to force everything.

There is a natural rhythm and we're going to talk more about how to handle these pauses and understand what they really are without excess self-judgment in negative ways.

I look forward to seeing you then. I hope you have an excellent week. And yeah, I'll see you in a week.

Related Episodes

Completing the Honest Year Review series:

This episode is the emotional heart of the autumn year-review arc. After asking what was real, what was enough, and what was done, we now face the feelings that letting go actually brings.

• Ep 51: What Level of Done Is Done? — Knowing When a Project or Goal Is Complete — Last week's foundation: deciding what to let go is the first half; this week is the emotional second half.
• Ep 50: What Counts as Enough — Redefining Accomplishment Beyond Society's Standards — The push-past-the-goalpost pattern ("more muscle, lower BMI") connects directly to this episode's look at moving goalposts.
• Ep 49: What Was Real This Year — What Your Actions Tell You About Your True Values — The alignment test that separates a true completion from a forced continuation.

Explore further:

• Ep 25: Outgrowing Your Old Identity: Navigating Life Changes and Personal Growth — The deepest companion piece on this episode's identity theme: the disorientation of outgrowing who you were.
• Ep 12: When You Don't Want Anything Yet — How to Be in January Without Forcing It — For the "glorious blankness" phase: permission to be in the not-knowing until desire returns on its own.

✨ In the middle of letting something go?

If this episode met you in the in-between, the Living in Rhythm Starter Kit can help you find solid ground. This free resource walks you through identifying your true values and moving with your feelings instead of against them — so when the next inspired move arrives, you'll recognize it as your own.

Download the free Living in Rhythm Starter Kit

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