I’ve always prided myself on being prepared.
Certainty.
Precision.
Control.
Those have been my north stars for as long as I can remember. How much can I plan? How much can I anticipate? What variables can I eliminate so the outcome bends in my favor?
Preparation felt like protection & control felt like safety. If I could foresee it, I could survive it. If I could manage it, I wouldn’t be blindsided. And for a long time, that worked.
Until it didn’t.
Lately, I’ve been watching more TV than usual. Not “avoid your responsibilities” levels, but enough to notice patterns. One to three episodes a day; a respectable binge, if I do say so myself. My current rotation? The Bear & Being Mary Jane.
Two very different worlds. One chaotic kitchen in Chicago. One polished newsroom & personal life in Atlanta. But both protagonists share something familiar: they are gripping tightly to the version of life they believe is best. Managing, orchestrating & overcorrecting. Trying to bend outcomes through sheer will.
Sound familiar?
There’s a scene in the final episode of season two of The Bear—slight spoiler, but stay with me—where the protagonist gets locked inside the walk-in refrigerator during a chaotic but critically important service: Friends & Family night. The handle of the fridge breaks. He cannot intervene. Cannot direct. Cannot fix. He has to sit there, trapped in the cold, listening to the noise outside, forced to trust that his team will carry it.
For someone who thrives on control, that’s torture.
And yet… things don’t implode.
They adjust & survive without him micromanaging every detail. At least that’s where I stopped in the episode.
That struck something in me.
Because sometimes letting go isn’t about quitting. It isn’t about giving up. It isn’t about irresponsibility. Sometimes it’s about accepting that white-knuckling your way through life is exhausting.
I know this intimately.
There are things in my own life I’ve held onto long past their expiration date. Not because they were right, but because they were predictable & familiar.
And familiar, even when uncomfortable, can feel safer than unknown.
But lately, I’ve been asking myself different questions:
What if uncertainty isn’t the threat I’ve made it out to be?
What if unclenching doesn’t mean collapse?
This letter was born from that tension.
If you’re gripping something tightly right now, whether it be a role, a relationship, an identity, a plan, a behavior, & you know in your body that it no longer fits, this one’s for you.
Dear You,
There’s something you’ve been holding onto that doesn’t feel right anymore.
Maybe it hasn’t felt right for a while.
But it’s familiar, & familiar has a strange kind of comfort to it… even when it hurts.
Sometimes we stay because we know how to survive there. We know the rules, patterns, & how to brace ourselves. The unknown, on the other hand, feels wide & uncontained. And if you’ve ever felt out of control before, you know how scary that can be…
So you grip tighter.
You tell yourself it’s not that bad. You say you just need to try harder. Adjust more. Be more patient. Be less sensitive. You convince yourself that letting go would be dramatic, irresponsible, or selfish.
But what if it’s none of those things? What if letting go is simply admitting the truth?
That something has run its course. That you’ve outgrown a room you once needed. That the version of you who could survive there isn’t the version of you who wants to keep living there.
Surrender doesn’t have to mean collapse.
It can just mean loosening your grip. It can mean saying, I don’t want to fight this anymore. It can mean trusting that uncertainty is not the same thing as danger.
I know the unknown can feel like standing at the edge of a bottomless dark pit. But sometimes that edge is the doorway.
Sometimes what feels like loss is just space clearing.
Ask yourself:
If I’m honest, what am I tired of carrying?
What would change if I stopped trying to force this to work?
If you’re looking for ease, really sit with these questions.
You don’t have to burn everything down. But maybe you can start by unclenching your hands.
There is something gentler waiting on the other side of that.
Remember that.
With you in your surrendering,
Kasim