I want to tell you about a night that I'm a little embarrassed to admit happened, but also not really, because I think you might need to hear it.
It was one of those evenings where everything on the surface looked completely fine. Dinner was made. The to-do list was mostly checked. Nobody was in crisis. And yet I was sitting on my bedroom floor at eleven at night, feeling this pressure in my chest that I could not explain and could not name and absolutely could not shake. Like something was trying to get out and I had spent so long keeping it in that I had forgotten it was even there.
I had been carrying a lot that year. A relationship that had quietly broken my heart before it ended. A version of myself I had outgrown but didn't know how to put down. Anger I had never let myself feel because I was too busy being understanding and gracious and completely fine, thank you for asking. Old grief. Borrowed guilt. The exhausting performance of holding it all together so well that even I started to believe the performance.
That night, something shifted. I picked up a pen and I just started writing.
It Didn't Start Poetically
I want to be honest about this because most journaling content makes it sound like you light a candle, put on ambient music, and pearls of wisdom flow out of you. That is not what happened.
What came out first was messy and circular and honestly a little embarrassing. I wrote about the same thing four different ways. I contradicted myself. I wrote a sentence and then wrote "I don't even know if that's true" right underneath it. I wrote things I had never said out loud, not to my best friend, not to my therapist, not to anyone, because some feelings feel too small to justify and too big to survive saying.
But here's what I noticed about ten minutes in. My chest felt different. Not fixed, not healed, just slightly less pressurized. Like a window had been cracked open in a room that had been sealed shut for too long.
I kept writing.
I wrote about the relationship. Not the sanitized version I had been telling people, the one where I was gracious and wished those well who did me wrong and had mostly moved on. I wrote the actual version. The one with the specific Tuesday afternoon where something was said and I smiled and nodded and went home and felt something crack quietly inside me. The one where I admitted, just to the page, that I was angrier than I had let myself be. That I had needed more than I asked for. That I missed a version of things that maybe never existed the way I remembered them.
I wrote about that one thing that hurt me the most. About a conversation from more than ten years ago that I thought I had forgiven but apparently had just filed away very neatly in a drawer I never opened.
I wrote about the version of myself I had been trying to keep alive out of loyalty to who I used to be, even though she didn't fit anymore. The ambitious, relentless, always-striving version who I thought was admirable but who was, if I was being honest with myself on the floor at eleven pm, absolutely exhausted and a little bit hollow.
I wrote until I ran out of words, which took longer than I expected.
Then I Tore the Pages Out
This is the part that sounds strange until you do it. The journal I was using, my Let It Go Journal, is designed specifically for this. The pages are meant to be torn out. That's not an accident or a quirk. It's the whole point.
There is something that happens in your body when you tear a page. It's physical and visceral and a little bit satisfying in a way that feels almost primal. You wrote the thing. You held it. And now you are choosing to release it. Not ignore it. Not suppress it again. Release it.
I tore out every page I had written that night. Slowly at first, and then with more conviction.
Then I took them outside.
I burned them.
I know how that sounds. I know it's a little dramatic. But I want to tell you that standing there watching those pages turn to ash, watching the words I had been afraid to feel literally disappear, something in me exhaled in a way that I had not exhaled in a very long time. It wasn't magic. It wasn't a cure. But it was a moment of ceremony around something real, and I think we are all desperately hungry for that, the chance to mark a thing as done. To say: I felt this, I honored it, and now I am putting it down.
I went to bed that night feeling lighter than I had in months.
Why the Physical Part Actually Matters
I used to think journaling was just about the writing. Getting thoughts out of your head and onto paper. And that part is genuinely valuable, there is real research behind expressive writing and its effect on stress, mood, and even physical health. But what I didn't understand until I experienced it is that the body holds things too. Not just the mind.
When we suppress emotions, we don't just tuck them away mentally. We carry them physically. Tight shoulders. A jaw that won't unclench. That pressure in the chest I described at the beginning of this. Our nervous systems are storing what we haven't processed, and sometimes you need to do something physical to signal to your body that it's safe to let go now.
Tearing a page is physical. Burning it is physical. Shredding it into tiny pieces is physical. These aren't just cute rituals. They are ways of completing the cycle that pure mental processing can't always finish on its own.
What Shifted After That Night
I want to be careful here because I don't want to oversell this. I didn't wake up the next morning transformed. I still had the same life, the same complicated feelings, the same work in progress that is being a human person.
But something had genuinely moved. The relationship stuff felt less like an open wound and more like a scar I was finally allowed to acknowledge. The anger I had been sitting on had somewhere to go now, which meant it stopped leaking sideways into places it didn't belong. And the version of myself I had been grieving, I think I finally gave her a proper goodbye that night, which meant I could start getting more curious about who I was becoming instead.
I kept using the journal. Not every night, not in any disciplined or rigorous way. But when something was building, when I could feel the pressure coming back, I knew what to do with it now. I had a place to put it. And more than that, I had a ritual for releasing it.
That changed things more than I can fully explain.
If You're Carrying Something You Haven't Named Yet
Maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about and you've been carrying something similar for longer than feels reasonable. Maybe you don't even know what it is yet, just that something feels stuck or heavy or like you're running at sixty percent of yourself and you can't figure out why.
The Let It Go Journal was built for exactly this. It has prompts that gently walk you toward the feelings you've been avoiding, the ones that live just underneath the surface of your regular thoughts. It gives you space to write without performing, without editing yourself, without needing to have it all figured out before you put pen to paper. And then it gives you permission to let it go. Literally. Tear the page out. Burn it, shred it, release it in whatever way feels right to you.
It's available as a printable PDF on Gumroad if you want to start today, and as a paperback on Amazon if you're someone who needs the physical thing in your hands, which honestly, given everything I just told you, makes complete sense.
You don't have to keep carrying it. That's the whole point.
You can put it down.
Comments
Post a Comment