Day 362 Risk: Let Go

After nearly ten years together, it’s rare for my husband and I to come out of an argument without something useful. We usually try to sit with each other until we’ve figured out what went wrong, or agree to come back to the problem later. Late, late Monday night the potential for an argument arose, and my husband shut it down before it even began.

Not gonna lie. This pissed me off.

I’m a talker; my husband is not. I like to mull things over by talking and talking and talking until my brain hurts; my husband prefers to mull in silence, only using his words when he’s sorted out his thoughts. On Monday night, we were both exhausted. And my husband told me that’s all our frustration was: exhaustion.

As I lay in bed later, trying to sleep, I found myself rethinking the mini argument, trying to figure out what happened. Once I had convinced myself that I had solved the mysteries of our relationship, I then began thinking about what we needed to do to change things. Once I had set up all the ways to make our relationship perfect, I allowed my frustration at my husband to build, growing angry that he was attempting to sleep while I was attempting to fix our obviously broken relationship. I mean, who sleeps at 1am? Lazy, just lazy.

That’s when it hit me. I was awake, at 1am, stewing in my bed over something I couldn’t even really pinpoint. I was tired, nothing more. I could either continue to go down the path of negativity or I could choose to think of this as grumpiness. But choosing the latter meant that I would have to do something that feels nearly impossible to me: let go. For control freaks like me, this felt like death.

I closing my eyes, focusing on relaxing my shoulders and chest and not the cycle of negativity floating around my head. I took many deep breaths and opened my eyes. I suddenly had the overwhelming urge to snuggle up to my sleeping hubby. Wrapping my arm around his waist, I pulled myself into him, matching his curves. While I still felt the tension in my chest and the buzzing in my brain, I slowly drifted off to sleep, finally letting go.