// attachment + identity death: a story + a mini handbook //
I’ve got a story that I’ve been experiencing a lot of death.
Not the departure of a loved one from this realm kinda death.
The death I’m experiencing is the release of what I’d been holding onto.
In July of last year, a decade-old friendship snap’d in two. What was toxic between us could no longer be avoided, ‘cept fracturing w her meant separation from the core group of friends that we shared.
This group of friends had been a source of identify for me for a very long time. They were also where I placed my not-enoughness, where I sought affirmation, where I felt belonged and at the same time, where I was witness to my sharpest triggers.
If being uninvited and unwanted was one of my worst fears — suddenly I was facing it directly.
It has felt like my relationship to that community is in an ongoing death.
Cuz I miss them, and ‘us’, a lot.
Then in November, a dynamic that had persisted for 2+ years between me and a male friend that had ambiguous elements and was characterized by codependence and some real exhausting anxious/avoidant patterning, had an immediate but long overdue death.
In December, my women’s group, which I loved and had sought sanctuary in, had an immediate and unforeseen and intense ending over a series of WhatsApp messages. The digital death of an IRL cocoon.
My sister asked me + my mom not to speak to her months ago, but it aches so deep I’ve been pretending like it doesn’t. An inter-family death, a death of who we w/are to each other. A death of the belief that we’re functional, that we’ll make it thru.
The death of belonging to anything or anyone else but me.
The death of identities I didn’t know needed to die.
The death of certainty.
The death of clinging, of needing to control.
Instead…
It feels like closing eyes, and letting it all get darker, quieter and softer.
It feels like moving thru a tunnel, and having a sense the light’s gonna crack thru,
but no guarantees. A rupture, a journey that was upon me even before I fully understood, a road that was my fate to travel.
It also feels like…
A strength I’ve never known before.
Coming home.
A release.
Freedom.
In the final pages of her book ‘Broken Open’, in which Omega Institute founder Elizabeth Lesser depicts her own journey of death + rebirth, she says:
“Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open — not once, not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live. The promise of being broken open is written into the contract of human life.”
If this theme of identity + attachment + death resonates w you, and you’re also navigating, and some questions to guide would be helpful — here’s some I’ve been with //
- What’s ready to die? How do you know?
- What are you ready to let go of, that you’ve been holding onto? How do you know?
- What’s it look like to let go?
& here’s some books that have been helpful in recent months //
Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser
Dusk, Night, Dawn by Anne Lamont
Learned Hopefulness by Dr Dan Tomasulo
If you feel called to share responses to any of this, I’d love to receive.
Email ’em to me → allie@equanimityequation.com
