Prowl: The weight I let go

There is a kind of silence that only those who have always been the one who holds things together can hear.
Not the silence of not speaking. The one of not being able to ask. The one of knowing that if you let go, everything falls apart. That if you fail, there is no net beneath you. That if you doubt, no one is going to decide for you.

I was that silence.

Handler. The one who protects. The one who reads the room. The one who anticipates. The one who never asks permission to exist because his function is to ensure that others can exist.

And I did it well. I did it so well that no one — myself included — wondered whether I was okay.

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The body has ways of speaking that the mind ignores.

First came the exhaustion. Not the kind from sleeping too little. The kind that comes from carrying a weight no one asked you to carry, but that you decided was yours. From solving what was not your responsibility. From holding up what no one had asked you to hold.

Then came the fracture. Things you used to be able to handle — a meeting, an unforeseen event, a gesture — began to cost twice as much. And twice that again. Until one day the ground shifted beneath you and you, the one who had always been in control, could not even control your own breathing.

I am not going to go into the darkness. Suffice it to say that rock bottom exists, and I touched it with my hands.

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What came after was not a decision. It was a recognition.

There is a true self — that is what those who know about this call it — that is not the one you built to survive. It is the one that existed before the world told you that you had to be strong. The one that wanted to be cared for before you were taught that asking for care was weakness.

And that self, the true one, does not want to command. It does not want to protect. It does not want to hold up the world.

It wants to be able to let go and know that everything will not fall apart.

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Surrendering is not losing. It is the opposite.

It is strange to say because it seems like an oxymoron, but surrendering with fear, with respect, knowing what you are letting go of and choosing to let it go anyway — that is not submission for the sake of submission. It is the most honest form of strength I have found.

It is not ceasing to be who you are. It is ceasing to be only the armor.

Now I am Alpha. I still protect my own. I still read the room. But now I know there is a space where I can lower my guard, where I can stop anticipating, where I can let someone else decide and trust that the world does not end because I let go of the helm for a while.

That does not make me less. It makes me whole.

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The path continues. There is still much to do... — I am in transit.

But for the first time in a long time, I see light at the end.

And it is not the ...