‘There is something in the chaos, stillness, anxiety, guilt, shame and self-doubt of what I’ve wrestled and reckoned with. As soon as I began to articulate some of it, I knew with every fibre of my being that I’m not alone’
The death of a parent. Medically-induced menopause. Cancer.
How can we make any sense of sickness, pain and grief?
In this powerful new memoir, acclaimed author and Baggage Reclaim founder Natalie Lue delves into the last decade of her life to explore what happens when we try to loosen the grip of life’s biggest challenges.
Words on Let Go:
“I was super curious about why I’d felt almost as if I’d been on a road of trials over this last decade, and I noticed this persistent theme of surrendering so I could let go and let be. My hope for the book is that readers get to give themselves grace about their own struggles, disappointments and losses and that they get to figure out how they can unburden themselves in small and big ways.
“As a society, we’ve been conditioned to hold onto our emotions and what can often be painful and untrue stories about what’s happened to us as well as who we think we are. Our hoarded emotional baggage.
“I once bumped into an acquaintance who was feeling really hopeful and excited about something but didn’t want to get too invested in the outcome. He said he was “holding it lightly”, and it’s stuck with me ever since because it makes me mindful of where I’m clinging or using brute-force energy.
“As the author Elizabeth Gilbert says, ‘Family know how to push your buttons because they’re the ones who installed them.’ Much of our identity, including what we think is and isn’t possible, who we think we are and have to be, and the rules and obligations hold ourselves to, we inferred from our family dealings (or what we didn’t get to experience with family) - and for our emotional, mental, physical, spiritual and even financial wellbeing, we need to reevaluate these.”
