Estimated read: 5 minutes
This essay is part of the Reinvention pillar at The Gracewell Studio. If you want the full guide to midlife awakening, purpose, and starting from here, start at the pillar here.
I have worked in places where the turnover told the whole story.
In one role I loved deeply, I watched seven colleagues come and go in the time I was there. Seven. The work itself was meaningful. The specialty was one I had spent years mastering. But the environment had a way of grinding people down until they disappeared, and whoever was left pretended it had nothing to do with the office culture.
I stayed longer than most. Because I was good at the work. Because I had invested years building expertise in a field I believed in. Because leaving felt like losing. Then one afternoon everything crystallized in a single moment.
I was deep in a high-pressure day, it was a Friday. A regulatory survey in the building, two complex cases on my plate, covering for a colleague out on leave. A leader followed me down the hall with rapid fire questions. When I sat down to pull the information she needed and asked her to repeat one detail, she said it back to me slowly. Deliberately. The way someone speaks when they have already decided you are not capable.
I responded. Calmly and directly.
What came next was a blindside I was not prepared for. A more senior leader called me in. The same colleague beside her. And I sat across from two people I had worked alongside for years and watched the story of what had just happened get rewritten in real time. By the time the shock and the tightness in my throat allowed me to speak, the only thing I could get out was this: I have ADHD. What just happened caused me to shut down. I process differently. I need you to understand that.
It did not land. I left that meeting somehow having apologized for being mistreated.
I stayed home that weekend and I stewed. And then something shifted.
The Weekend That Changed Everything
That weekend I learned more about myself than I had in years.
Midlife has a way of doing that. The hormonal rewiring, the reduced tolerance for what does not align with who you actually are, the clarity that arrives when you finally stop explaining yourself to people who were never going to hear you anyway. It all converged in those two days.
I realized with absolute certainty that place was asking me to be less than I was. And I had been shrinking to fit for longer than I wanted to admit.
So I made a plan.
I stayed for one more year. Intentionally. Researching, preparing, saving, building. Quietly becoming someone who was ready for what came next. I still work within the same organization today, in a different role, with people who respect me. I made less money for a season and found creative ways to make it work. My peace was worth every bit of the adjustment.
And in that year of preparation, Gracewell was born.
That is the difference between giving up and letting go.
What the Research Confirms
Psychologists have studied this distinction and what they found matters.
Hu et al. (2023), publishing in Frontiers in Psychology, found that releasing a path that has become misaligned with your deepest sense of meaning is one of the most health-promoting decisions a person can make. People who could honestly disengage from what no longer fit them, and turn toward what did, showed measurably better mental and physical outcomes.
Sease et al. (2024) found that the capacity to surrender, to release the grip on what cannot be controlled, is directly associated with greater wellbeing. Surrender in their framework is a courageous act of reorientation. An opening rather than a closing.
Giving up collapses inward. Letting go opens forward.
How to Feel the Difference in Your Body
When you imagine releasing the thing you are holding, notice what happens in your chest.
Giving up feels like the floor dropping. Defeat lives in it. You feel smaller than you were before.
Letting go feels like a clearing. Like a breath you have been holding for months finally released. There is grief sometimes. And underneath the grief there is space. And in that space something new can breathe.
That sensation is information. Trust it.
What Every Tradition Knows
In my training as an interfaith minister I encountered this truth in every spiritual lineage I studied.
Buddhism calls it non-attachment. Clinging to what is impermanent creates suffering. Releasing with grace creates freedom.
In Christian mysticism it is kenosis. The emptying of self to make room for something greater to enter.
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu describes wu wei. The wisdom of knowing when to stop pushing against the current and allow the river to carry you where it already knows you need to go.
Every tradition arrives at the same place. There is a kind of strength that looks like release. A kind of courage that looks like surrender. A kind of wisdom that only arrives when you open your hands.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If you are holding something right now, a job, a relationship, a role, a story about who you are supposed to be, ask yourself this.
Am I releasing this from a place of clarity and honest seeing?
Or am I still in the grip of something that is asking to be released?
Letting go from that place of clear-eyed honesty is one of the bravest things a person can do. And it almost always takes longer than anyone tells you. A year of preparation is wisdom.
Your Take-Home
You are allowed to put things down.
You are allowed to close chapters. You are allowed to walk away from environments and versions of yourself that were built for survival and choose something built for joy instead.
Letting go is the beginning of the next thing. Every time.
Stay in it.
Gracewell Is Here for the Journey
If you are working through what to release and what to carry forward, Gracefully Unstuck is the workbook series built for exactly this kind of honest inner work. One proven tool, one step at a time. $11 a month.
And if you want something to carry that was made from what was released and made beautiful, The Studio Collection is exactly that.
Next in this series: What a Nurse Knows About Getting Unstuck (link goes live soon)
This essay is part of the Reinvention pillar at The Gracewell Studio. If you want the full guide to midlife awakening, purpose, and starting from here, start at the pillar here.
A Blessing for the One Who Is Ready to Let Go
May you find the courage to open your hands. May the thing you have been carrying so long land gently when you finally set it down. May the space it leaves behind fill with something that was always meant for you. And may you know, in the quiet that follows, that releasing is arriving.
Go gracefully. 🤍
About the Author
Rev. Kristina Soto, RN, BSN Registered Nurse · Quality Management · Interfaith Minister · Usui Ryoho Reiki Master · Founder, The Gracewell Studio
Kristina is a Registered Nurse with nearly two decades of clinical experience, including more than ten years in quality management and performance improvement, and now in case management. She is an ordained Interfaith Minister through One Spirit Learning Alliance, a Usui Ryoho Reiki Master, a Shamanic Reiki Practitioner, a New York State NYC Marriage Officiant, and the founder of The Gracewell Studio, where artful living meets well-being. Read more about Kristina.
References
Hu, X., Zhang, H., & Geng, M. (2023). Letting go or giving up? The influence of self-transcendence meaning of life on goal adjustment in high action crisis. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1054873. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1054873
Sease, T. B., Andersland, M., Perkins, D. R., Sandoz, E. K., Jean, C., Sudduth, H., & Knight, K. (2024). Surrendering to thrive: Evaluating the psychometric properties of the State of Surrender scale and its relationship with well-being. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 33, 100815. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2024.100815
