Episode 24: Letting Go

Hey, everybody, this is Mallory Durrick. And welcome to the 24th episode of Don’t lose your balance. I have attempted to record this particular episode. This is my second or third attempt. And I started over the weekend, I’m not really sure where I’m going. And I still don’t know where I’m going. And I don’t know what to talk about. And I even titled The episode of not sure. And I thought that’s not an episode. That’s somebody who has absolutely no idea where they’re going and what they’re going to share. You know, these particular episodes of this podcast, were designed in my head to have these titles so that I could share what I wanted to share, and put it out there. And I’ve spoken about this in the past, put it out there and then just let go. Because letting go for me has been really difficult in my lifetime. In fact, my inability to let go actually got me addicted to drugs, and I couldn’t let go of those either. And when I finally let go of those, I moved on to maybe something else, like maybe I was still drinking, I didn’t let go of that. I can’t let go of bad feelings that I have, I can certainly say that. I don’t know if it’s about hanging into the past, or just my inability to let go until I am finished with whatever it is that I’ve got to do. And I feel like this particular episode is not going to be you know, overwhelmingly organized, it’s not going to have any kind of a particular topic until maybe I listened to it back I don’t even know if I’m going to air it but if you’re hearing it then clearly I did.

I feel this sense of obligation to myself not to anybody out there who’s listening because I don’t know who’s listening. But I feel this obligation to myself to stay committed to this podcast every single week. And you know, record them moderately edit now and create whatever creative I use for Instagram or Facebook and then get it done and I don’t really want this to be the kind of thing that takes me hours upon hours like in the first episodes that I created. I was doing them for you know all day and recording all day scripting all day editing all day, and I could get through three of them in a weekend. I don’t have time to do that anymore. I also don’t know how boring they are. These episodes are nothing more than you know conversations about my life. I’m not actually having a conversation with anybody. And I’m listening back and I think okay, yeah, I’m I’m sharing what I’m sharing I think I’m being overwhelmingly transparent about my life hoping that it will help somebody and you know, not lose their balance like I did. I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen but maybe they won’t feel so alone. And then you know what, when I get through it, I have to say it feels better to me I resolve whatever conflict may be going on or share whatever joy I might be feeling. Put it up on the air you know it like I said, Oh, in the on the air, if you will, and I let go. And maybe that’s the title of the episode. The the title of this episode should be letting go. We as individuals, me specifically have held on so tightly to things in my past because I wasn’t ready for it to be finished. And sometimes things run their course before we’re ready to say goodbye. And that includes you know, people who who move on and death, people who move on in moving on to new relationships.

People who I don’t know people who make changes in their life that may not include us and that concludes friendships. I said relationships so it should go under the umbrella of relationships and I’m going to tell you that this. This episode that I’m struggling so much with, I’ve attempted to record it several times. And then my headset died. And I had to charge it for a little bit, I have to walk away from it. And I can’t let go, I can’t let go of making sure that I record an episode. And even if it’s the worst episode I’ve ever recorded, I don’t care. I mean, I care, but I don’t care, I think I care more about having that gap. Because I have this commitment in my mind of 52 weeks, you know, consistently recording 52 weeks. And these episodes don’t have to be very long. I feel a little bit like I’m rambling. And I know that that happens a lot when people are, I watch a lot of YouTube. And when people are recording their episodes, they feel like they too are rambling. And then they I don’t know, they do a whole lot of edits to keep it going. I don’t want to record for the sake of recording. But I do want to talk about letting go. And how difficult letting go is because of whatever attachment we have, I have in my head about what that meant. You know, I have to be pretty pushed, I have to be pushed pretty far off a ledge to let go. And that could be in work, let’s just use work for an example. If I’m tasked or saddled with a project, I will stop at nothing to ensure that it’s gone to its completion. And maybe that’s a part of having some perfectionist issues. And I’ve thought about this, and I’ve talked about this a lot, but I’m not sure it’s all about perfection. As much as it’s something in my head that says you have done your absolute best, you have left no stone unturned? Well, in the context of this example, this not letting go has served has served me quite well. Because I won’t just say well, I’ll leave that for another day. Or maybe that is somebody else’s problem. I don’t let myself to do that. I also want to know that I’ve learned something new. Okay. So in the context of that, yes, letting go is is not letting go is a good thing, in the relationships. Not letting go of a relationship is hard. Because I I don’t know if it’s about not wanting to hurt somebody, it’s easier if they let go of me maybe and then I can’t let go of the pain that I’m feeling. And I want to stress that somewhere in the last two years, I have managed to figure out how to let go and be okay with whatever those boundaries are. And maybe I’ll have to talk about boundaries and far more in depth, which I have mentioned in previous episodes, because I have had to let go of people that I have loved, like we all have, and yet it’s ripped me apart inside.

Because I want to return to the beginning days of what it all looked like when it first started. And more importantly, when it was healthy. I had to learn how to let go of, you know, my, I guess it’s my emotional attachment to whatever that thing or person represented. That’s hard. Because I again, want to go back to how I felt in the very beginning. And there’s this kind of fresh in this newness in the relationship. But then you know, you got to let go of it. Because it’s not it’s not healthy. And it’s not what you thought it might have been in your head and I can speak. I can speak to the affair on that. Because I had a really hard time letting go. I mentioned that I felt like a limb had been removed from my body. My heart was really broken. And I wasn’t left in that con in that conversation. He and I made a mutual decision together. We needed to end it. And once I had to live with that awful decision. It’s not like we were fighting for one another and he said I or he I was fighting for him. We both we were right there aligned with one another about how this thing was going to end. We knew it was wrong. And we knew we got it. We had to get out of it. And we both agreed and yet I was left feeling very distraught. I don’t know if it was the feeling of I wanted to return to the feeling of feeling beautiful and feeling desired and feeling wanted or in fact if it was just I want to have that little bit of escape from my unhappiness. And you would look around and say what is so unhappy for you? You’ve got these beautiful children. You’ve got a wonderful husband, you’ve got a fabulous home, but I wasn’t because I was deep rooted into a drug addiction which was clearly ruining spiraling me so far out of control, I will honestly say that letting go of the drugs, you know how I had to let go of them, I had to be so sick in withdraw, and so far gone with where I was. And I guess they call that hitting bottom. And I talked about go lower, lower than bottom. I wanted out, I wanted to let go of them and the climb back. It’s not like one day on Monday, I said, Okay, I’m gonna let go of these drugs. And then Friday, it was all done. It was such a slow climb back to that balance I talked about and I referring to a lot of these previous episodes. So in case people are maybe the random person who stumbles upon this particular episode and says, What is she talking about, then you can go back and listen, learning to let go was just that learning, I had to learn what I had to do, to be able to deal with whatever pain there might have been associated with the letting go, I’m not going to suggest that people shouldn’t grieve the loss of a loved one, whether they’re still living and the relationship has died, or they have died. I encourage everybody who may be in a deep sense of grief, to get some help a therapist, a grief counselor, whatever a group, because being alone in it is pretty hard. And I don’t think anybody should actually have to be alone. But I don’t think I’m going to say this. I don’t think that every solution is right for every person.

You know, I had this weird conversation with my mom the other day about my addiction. And I had said to her, I think in hindsight, I didn’t need rehab. I just needed a really good addiction counselor. Because once I got out of the withdrawal, I never looked back. I mean, I never looked back and I got I want to do those drugs again. I want Viking and I want Viking like many of the women who were in that group, they glorified it. And I was just done. And I did let go, did I need 30 days of rehab it? I don’t know, $40,000? Probably not. I don’t feel like the benefit of rehab was there. I said it in the past, you know, I was letting go of the drug. And I had to do all this work to get rid of the drug. And this work that they speak about is you need to go to AA and you need to go to meetings. Well, maybe that worked for you. But it didn’t actually work for me. So I want to make that very clear that for me, it was a you know, it was a very different experience. And when I say it didn’t work for me, I can tell you that I literally remember every day of 30 days, and I kept thinking to myself, I just got to get out of here. But when I left, I was still in withdrawal. So how did 30 days of rehab helped me. It didn’t really help me, it just made me tired of thinking about every moment of what I had been through. I got more value out of a year and a half of group therapy at home with an addiction counselor who monitored me and made sure that I stayed on Suboxone every single day for 10 years until I could let go of that. So I guess the best way that I can approach this particular episode, and I am going to entitle it, letting go. Think about what you’re holding on to in the first place. And I guess I shouldn’t really say it think about I’m not a therapist, so I shouldn’t speak of it like that. But I should say what am I holding on to in the first place? Am I holding on to this memory of how great things were? Well, if I go back into the affair, it was only great for a minimal amount of time. And then it became nothing more than something that was just full of anxiety. And perhaps I made something up in my head about it. Or perhaps with the drugs. It felt good in the moment. But there was so much worse stuff that went along with it. That letting go finally was easy relationships that have had, I’ll say run their course you can let go because I can let go because I’m holding on to perhaps just a little bit of remembering in wanting to go back to that happier time and you know what, it’s never going to be like that again. And it makes room for wonderful things to happen. Later you make room and space In your head, you make room and space in your time, when you let go of the things that are full of clutter full of chaos, and then it opens you up to the possibility of something so much better, something greater than you could ever imagine. You know, as I sit here, and I’m recording this episode, that is really been a struggle. I feel like it’s all over the place. And I guess I’m going to say I care, because I care about putting out quality work. But I guess I don’t necessarily care if it’s a mess. In the in that I don’t want to be perfect. I want to be raw and real about what all of this means. Letting go is going to be hard for me here because I’m thinking if I listened back on it, and I’ve really struggled, my headset died, I

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had to open a gratitude room. It’s you know, freezing outside, I can’t turn the heat on because I don’t want the the heater to be picked up by the microphone. It’s 10, after nine in the morning on a Tuesday before it’s going to air tomorrow. And all I can think to myself is what a mess. And what can I do? Well, I could hang on to this perfectionist idea of what I’m trying to accomplish here. Or I can do exactly what the topic is called, which is letting go of whatever it is, I need to create something that makes no sense to anybody else, but me. And I want to be able to just throw it out there. And if nobody listens, nobody listens. And if everybody listens, even better. The greatest takeaway that I can express in this particular episode, is that when I learned to let go, when I learned to really let go and stop holding on to whatever was weighing me down. It made room. It created a sense of peace. And I can truly say, without hesitation, I am the happiest I have ever been in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had very happy moments in my life, meaning I was happy with my children. I was happy with my husband, I was happy with some jobs. But I have never felt happy and peaceful at the same time. Not sure how I managed to accomplish it. But I like getting up in the morning. I like what I do. And I like putting my head down at the end of the day. And feeling like I matter. And I matter to me, because I have looked in life and said you don’t matter Mallory. So what’s it all for? But I don’t feel that way now. And I hope that this podcast matters to somebody. Even if it’s just me. Anyway, okay, well, if you liked this or any other episode of Don’t lose your balance, follow me download it, share it with somebody you know, you can follow me on Instagram, I have two handles. First is Don’t lose your balance M S D That’s Mary Sam David and Mallory underscore Duric. And the other thing I wanted to tell you about is my website, which probably nobody goes to, which is Don’t lose your balance.com follow me on Facebook if you like and send me a comment. You know, I’d love to know how this is working for for somebody out there who might be randomly listening. I know some people have reached out to me and said, Yeah, that’s great. You know, you’re pretty transparent about your life and isn’t that brave? I don’t know if it’s brave or just plain stupidity. Anyway, have a great day everybody and I will see you next week on Don’t lose your balance. See ya!

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Hi, I am Mallory Durrick. I am a creative. A Marketing Strategist and Web Designer with a small and modest boutique Marketing Agency living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am the creator and narrator of this podcast, Don’t Lose Your Balance. This is a culmination of decades of self-help books, countless doctors, numerous hospitals, including rehabs. Once a wife, now divorced, a mother, a grandmother and an addict in recovery. These are things that I am and have experienced.

I’m sharing it all. Baring it all. Hoping to help others; not lose their balance.