On Learning to Let Go

It’s funny how much your life can change in a year.

This time last year, I lived in a different house in a different town, worked in a different job, and lived with a different person. I had different plans and expectations for the future.

The start of summer brought difficult conversations to the forefront which ultimately resulted in my partner and I deciding to go our separate ways, as we no longer wanted the same things for the future. While there are no hard feelings and I wish him the best, it has been immensely difficult coming to terms with the fact that the person I have shared my life with for three years and planned my future around, the person I once considered my best friend and soulmate, is no longer in my life.

Despite the difficulty, I am so evidently blessed by a God who cares for me. In the early days of these discussions with my then partner, my mom arrived for a pre-planned visit and we got to spend two weeks together, talking and spending time together in a way that hasn’t really happened in several years due to the fact that we live an ocean apart.

I reached out to a friend who was seeking accommodation in Edinburgh for the summer and invited her to live with me, and toward the end of August, my cousin moved into the spare room to attend a study abroad programme also in Edinburgh.

The summer was a busy one, which helped take my mind off things. In June and July, I had the opportunity to attend several concerts, including a few with my new colleagues at the Edinburgh Tattoo. I was blessed by the most amazing work friends who soon became real friends, who came alongside and supported me, and who made even this mostly rainy summer bright with their friendship and company.

In August, the city of Edinburgh comes alive with festivals, including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Since moving to Scotland five years ago, seeing a handful of shows at the world’s largest performing arts festival has become a time-honoured tradition for me, but this was my first year living in Edinburgh while the Fringe was on and the experience certainly lived up to all my expectations.

August also brings the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which I helped produce in my new administrative role there. It was a tiring but rewarding and very joyous month working long and hard with good people to make the performing arts happen, which is my favourite thing to do.

I also turned twenty-six in August, and it felt good to put my twenty-fifth summer behind me, shedding the skin like a snake to embrace the fresh start.

The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo

Even better was September, the start of the academic year (although I am no longer a student) which feels more fresh and hopeful to me than any January first. All autumn long, the kettle boiled, a warm glow shone from a candle melting autumnal wax melts on the windowsill, and outside, the leaves were changing colours. Every month, I rejoiced at the fresh start a blank calendar page offered, ready to be filled with new plans and dreams and, ultimately, expectations.

Sometimes I think I am too reliant on making plans. I am a planner by nature—I love using Notion, tracking deadlines and friends’ birthdays on wall calendars, desk calendars, diaries, you name it. I love colour-coding and planning my life months in advance. For the most part, knowing what to expect and what I have to look forward to keeps me sane. But the downside to all my dreaming and planning is that it breeds disappointment when my expectations aren’t met.

While it helps to be prepared, there’s a bigger life skill I cannot seem to master: the act of surrender, the art of letting go.

According to the Bible, this kind of hyper-planning is a mistake that leads to self-reliance, or reliance on the future that we as humans know nothing about.

A concise example can be found in Proverbs 27:1 (NIV), which says, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.”

More often, I think about James 4:13-16 (NIV), which says, “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.”

Ouch. James is a hard-hitting book, and for that reason, it is one of my favourites, but this passage is particularly hard for me to grapple with. I don’t know about you, but I generally avoid thinking of my life as a mist that will soon vanish. It makes me uncomfortable to realise how little control I have over my life. I don’t want to think of myself as arrogant or my actions as boastful and evil.

When Covid toppled my plans and the world as I knew it in 2020, I thought I had learned my lesson. I had a difficult time adjusting to the new and absurd state of the world, in which my first year of university was cut short and I mourned the loss of the experiences I was supposed to have.

By the end of the pandemic, however, I understood that had become a better, more flexible person. I planned my week, but I understood the future was outside of my control and tried to do the best I could with what I was given. I threw myself into new hobbies, from embroidering to playing guitar, read my Bible daily, took an online course on ethics, and pushed myself to meet new people and make new friends. I tried my best to accept new experiences as they came without expectation and the eventual disappointment or clenched-fist stubbornness that comes with that.

Then, as time went on, life began to go back to normal. I was thankful; that was what I wanted. But I lost my grip on building that better person. Once again, I started to trust my own plans. I became comfortable in routines. I placed less faith in God and more in other people.

I try to think, I learned my lesson once and forgot it, and in His merciful way, He is teaching me again. Let go, He says. Let go. Trust me. I try to think that way, but admittedly, the lesson feels more like a curse than a blessing—maybe even a punishment.

I was going to call this post ‘The Magic of Letting Go’—a la The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up or The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck. But the truth is, it’s hard to let go of the things we love, and I don’t want to surrender control over them. Sometimes letting go feels more like having things ripped from my hands than willingly laying them down. 

The things I lost in the breakup were innumerable. I lost not only a best friend and supposed soulmate, but also the only other living speaker of a dying language made up of personal shorthand and inside jokes. I lost a routine, a way of living that was particular to us. I lost the pleasure gained from three years of memories and ephemera that litters what used to be our flat, not just mine. 

I lost an entire future that I had not only been dreaming of or planning but counting on for the past three years. I lost the future surname and in-laws and a piece of my identity I had taken for granted. As an American, I lost the security of a spousal visa that would allow me to stay in the country I have chosen to make my home, in the city that I moved to because of the planned future with my partner.

For a long time I wished there was something I could do to magically fix everything, to regain control of the situation and get my life back. I wished I lived in a movie, where all I’d have to do is run through the airport and give a dramatic speech and everything would be okay, but the truth is that some bridges are meant to be burned.

Still grieving several months post-breakup, I prayed that God would either reopen the door or close it definitively. The next day, I received a message that prompted me to reach out to someone in his inner circle, another woman I considered a friend, to check in. What followed was an extremely hurtful conversation where my reputation was called into question based on false information. Clearly, she had been given some bad information about me.

On my lunch break I sat on a park bench and cried. I couldn’t believe that three years of loving and being loved by someone I believed I would marry had been reduced to this unfathomable pit of blame and lies and hurt. In that moment, I realised my prayer had been answered, just not in the way I wanted it to be.

That week, I struggled with the thought that fully surrendering to God and accepting a future I cannot predict nor control terrifies me. I wondered why God asked me to love this man with such trust and abandon, knowing without a doubt—untypical for me—that we were supposed to be together, only to be asked to let him go three years later and be so hurt in the process.

The pastor of my church recently said that a loving God would always wait for consent to work in our lives. I do want Him to work, but I don’t remember ever consenting to this. 

In the months that have followed, I have prayed and reflected and asked trustworthy sources, and I still don’t have a clear answer. What I do know is that, as uncertain as the future is, God’s love for us is certain and never-changing. His love never fails. It never gives up. The Bible doesn’t promise an easy life or a life free from suffering, but it does promise that God is with us, that He will never leave nor forsake us. Because of that, I do not need to be afraid or discouraged (Deuteronomy 31:8).

As I said to a friend on our annual call on New Year’s Day, “I don’t know why any of this happened, but I know God is providing for me in the process.”

Not only is He providing, He knows what He’s doing even when I don’t. Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV) says, “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.’”*

It’s a comforting thought that even when I don’t know what the future will bring, the almighty and loving God does.

My favourite band, the Glasgow-based Belle and Sebastian, expresses a similar sentiment in a song called ‘Nobody’s Empire’, in which lead singer Stuart Murdoch sings about his relationship with his faith in the midst of chronic illness that changed his life. Speaking to God, he says, “Let me dangle awhile in this waiting room / I don’t need to go, I don’t need to know what you’re doing / You know what you’re doing.”

I say all this not because I have it figured out, but because I clearly do not. This is clearly a lesson I haven’t yet learned: faith in my own plans is sorely misplaced, but faith in God will never let me down, even when I don’t see what He sees. I’ll keep learning as long as I need to that it’s okay to let go, surrender control, and trust that it will all work out the way it was meant to.

I’m still heartbroken, grieving the person I was this time last year and the life she led. I’m still scared, uncertain of what the future will bring. I still haven’t recovered from the drastic changes that took place last year. 

But already, one day into 2025, good things are happening. I’m spending time with friends, my future flatmate, and my family; going on dates; and taking on new responsibilities at work. I’m excitedly pursuing new dreams, and every day, I’m learning to trust that it will all be okay in the end. And hey, there’s a new season of Traitors out, so I’m watching that. 

As the Scots say, “Whit’s fur ye’ll no go past ye”—what will be will be, and I’m choosing to believe that.

*Other helpful verses include (but are by no means limited to) Psalm 23:4, Psalm 90:1-2, Psalm 102:25-27, Hebrews 13:8, Numbers 23:19, Matthew 24:35, James 1:17, Matthew 28:20, Romans 8:38-39, Joshua 1:9, Isaiah 41:10, Lamentations 3:22, Isaiah 40:27-28.