The Detour Project

Letting go

(note: read My Background first)

Before we can truly move toward an empowered life filled with passion and purpose, we must learn to forgive those who have hurt us. The forgiveness is not for them – it’s for us. As long as we hang on to hate, anger or spite we will never truly be free to live and to love. We have to understand and accept that everyone is a human being with flaws and faults and hurts. We all make mistakes and bad decisions and act out of anger or fear sometimes. We all come from different places and we all experience pain. I had to come to terms with the fact that my father was human, and that he was hurting in a way that he couldn’t see any other way out of. He made a choice that I was powerless to change and that I couldn’t understand. I was angry and hurt, and I had to let that go before I could move on. 

My first step towards forgiveness, and my breakthrough moment, was a letter that I wrote to my father 10 years after his suicide. In this letter, I put into words, and onto paper how angry I was at him for doing what he did and leaving my brother and I at a time in our lives when we needed him most. I told him how sad I was that he was never there for the important events in my life like getting my drivers license or graduating from high school. I told him that I was tired of living my life from the sidelines, watching all my friends grow up and graduate from college and start families. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to love and be loved. I wanted to feel connected to the people in my life and to life in general. I told him that I couldn’t do any of this until I was able to forgive him for what he did, and until I felt his forgiveness in my heart for the things I said and did.

I told him that I was sorry. I told him that I forgave him. I told him that I missed him, and that I loved him… and I said “goodbye”.

I took that letter to his grave that day. It was the first time I was able to bring myself to the cemetery. Going there, visiting his grave, seeing his headstone – that would make everything real, and I was terrified of that. For so long I tried to make myself believe that I had always hated him, or that he never even existed. But I went that day, and I faced my fears. I read the letter out loud to him, and I have never cried in my life the way I cried that day, in that moment. I lost it. I trembled, I shook, and I wept uncontrollably. It was the hardest thing I had ever had to do in my life. After I finished reading the letter to him, I burned it and watched the ashes scatter over his grave and into the wind. I begged for some kind of sign that he had heard me, and the leaves on the tree nearest to his grave started rustling. In that moment, I knew he had heard me, and forgiven me, and that he was out there somewhere, that God was out there somewhere, that redemption was possible.

This experience inspired me to write No Resolve, to pick up my guitar again, and to start putting my life back together. Since that day, I have used writing and music as an outlet for the pain in my life. Since that day, I have had the courage and motivation to start facing my fears, and to look for answers, and to chase my passions, to search for the truth, to find out what helps us live with passion and purpose in a world and life that can sometimes be painful and difficult to navigate.

That pivotal moment was 11 years ago. Today, as I write this, I am 35 years old. 10 years older than I ever thought I would be. Although it has been a lengthy process coming back up to the surface, with plenty of setbacks along the way, that moment was when I decided that I wouldn’t give up, no matter how hard things got, and that I would do whatever it took to find peace, balance and happiness in my life. It’s taken me a long time to get where I’m at today, but everything that I have learned along the way is in this book in the hopes that maybe your journey can be shorter. I don’t have all the answers, but I am committed to a life of learning, and pursuing truth and passion and purpose. I’m human; life still does (and will always) present new challenges and some painful experiences. I still have setbacks from time to time, but the difference today is that I have the tools and skills to help me cope, and overcome.

** this post is an excerpt from Building a Foundation for Happiness