Two Letters That Changed Everything: From Letting Go to Letting Be - Part 1
October 15, 2025—It was 2005. In the four years since 9/11, my whole life had changed—some of it by choice, some because life simply happened to me. That August, I began a journey that would alter everything.
When we look back on the paths that brought us to where we are, we can often see the choice points—the pivots, the crossroads—and we can point to them and say, Here. Right here, my life changed. But we rarely know it at the time.
That August, I started a new job at an alternative high school program on Capitol Hill in downtown Seattle. The education program was part of a street-youth advocacy center. We served folkx ages 16 yrs and up who were unhomed, couch-surfed, stayed in shelters, or had housing that wasn’t always stable or safe. Stepping into the PSKS Center felt like entering a foreign land for this middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual, educated white woman. Despite my good intentions and efforts, I was quite ignorant about so many things outside my protected and privileged circle. And in spite of my courage, the somewhat foolish intrepidness—when I entered the world of street-involved youth in early-2000s Seattle, I had fear.
The cost of service and carrying others’ burdens
Those of us called to serve adolescents—to walk with them through the turbulence of becoming—inevitably take them into our hearts. We carry them, sometimes far too closely. There are many stories to tell of my tenure there, when my life pivoted again and again and how I found my way from there to here. But in this post, I want to talk about something else: how we be with the kids we work with—how we love and care for and about them, sometimes to our own detriment.
I made the trek from my island home across the ferry, down the interstate, and up the hill to PSKS four days a week, then turned around and did it all again going home. There were days I sat in I-5 traffic weeping, raging, heartbroken, and heartsick—for the kids, against the systems, and for my own teenage self, who I later realized was still trying to be saved through my work with these kids.
Over time, my body bore the cost. My back ached from the commute. My blood pressure rose. My weight fluctuated. And the exhaustion—well, it was bone-deep. I did all the “right” things: took supplements, went to the doctor, journaled, practiced mindfulness. I saw a massage therapist for a year. I even invested in expensive fascia treatments. Still, the exhaustion consumed me. Finally, a wise physician diagnosed me with adrenal fatigue, and we began to address that. But what became clear was this: the weight of carrying “my kids” was a terrible burden.
About empathy
One of the great ironies of being a human service provider is empathy. Empathy is often the royal gate—the royal path—to our calling. It’s the trail of wounds that leads us back to our own stories. It makes sense, doesn’t it? But it can only carry us so far.
Mary Oliver writes, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
There was a part of me that believed the only way I could truly serve these kids was to feel their pain, to carry it, to take their stories home with me. On particularly hard days, I’d pull into my driveway, sit for a moment, and say aloud, I’m going inside now, and you all must remain out here.
Sometimes they didn’t listen. They would gather around my bed at night, wake me with their anxieties, and I would have to tell them to leave, closing the door. That’s a painful thing to do when you’re deeply empathic—because it feels like you’re not only shutting the door on them, but on your own broken heart. The cold, hard slam.
A standard piece of advice we’re given—and give ourselves—is to let it go. Sometimes we even demand it of ourselves. I tried, but I didn’t believe I could connect with my students if I didn’t feel their pain. If I wasn’t consumed and burdened, I thought I wasn’t doing my job. It was all or nothing. And it was literally killing me.
Then I read an essay by Tracy Cochran, which, alas, seems to be no longer available, that changed everything. She writes,
“More and more, I like the phrase ‘let it be’ to ‘let it go’ because letting go can feel like too much doing—inviting the ego to take over, ending the sense of being with life. It conveys a gentle movement of availability.”
And so I changed just two letters—and everything changed.
Let it be
When we let it be, we become Shiftless Wanderers. We let things unfold, let others have their own journeys, and remember that our role is not to carry them, but to walk beside them. There is a distinct energetic shift when we change those two letters. A great deal of effort sometimes is expended in the attempt to let things go that dearly matter to us, and we will continue to carry them even at our own expense. In Part 2, I’ll explore how we make that shift from letting it go to letting it be.
Photo by: serkanmutan