Let That Shit Go

March 2026 | Living REAL with Heidi Coleman

My husband bought me a trailer.

Not as a joke, not as a grand gesture — as a practical act of love. I was spending a lot of time at my folks’ house, helping care for my mom, and the house was full in the way houses get when life has been lived hard in them for a long time — clutter, confusion, the particular chaos of a family in the middle of something it can’t name yet. My husband saw that I needed somewhere to land that was mine. So, he bought a trailer and had it parked at their place. My good friend Matthew, whose been a part of our family since grade school, came and hooked everything up so I could actually live in it.

It became my oasis. In the middle of the chaos. In the middle of goodbye.

One of the first things I did was hang a small decorative hand towel up as a reminder.

I had bought it somewhere — one of those things you pick up because it makes you laugh and also because it’s true — and it said, in the most colorful embroidered letters you’ve ever seen: A wise girl once said... “Let that shit go.” And she lived happily ever after.

I hung it where I could see it every single day. And every day it said exactly what I needed to hear.

At the time, letting go meant the invisible things. The comments that landed wrong. The guilt I carried for not doing enough, being enough, staying long enough. The control I kept reaching for in a situation that could not be controlled. The grief that had no name yet because she was still here, still present, still my mother — just fading in ways I didn’t have language for. That’s what I was letting go of, or trying to, every time I looked at that towel hanging in my little trailer while the world inside the house kept spinning.

That was the season I was in. The middle of goodbye.

The trailer is gone now. My mother is gone now. Matthew is gone now.

But the towel came home with me to Eugene. It hangs in our spare room now, on the brass headrail of my childhood bed — too high to climb into anymore, waiting for a friend’s granddaughter to claim it. The room doubles as a walk-in closet. Extra hanging space, two dressers, one mirrored filled with more scarves than I’ll ever wear. Under the bed, two boxes of my mother’s jewelry and personal things I still haven’t gone through. Sweaters. Swimsuits and pareos waiting on a summer I’m not sure is coming for them. Hats upon hats. Handbags. My hope chest, which has lived with me longer than almost anything else in that room.

Everything in there is mid-letting-go. Including me.

I’ve been slowly, quietly working on it. Not as a project — just as a quiet reckoning with the weight of accumulated things. One item at a time. A little more room to breathe. I overheard something recently that stopped me: if you wouldn’t buy it again, it should go. Simple. Obvious. And somehow I had never heard it quite that cleanly before.

And here’s what happened this morning.

It was a quiet Sunday in March — ninety days from something I’ve been working toward for a long time, a kind of financial freedom I’m not going to get into here because that’s not this story, but it’s part of my story and it was sitting quietly underneath everything else this morning the way good things do when they’re almost here. And I’m in my 60th year. The Fire Horse cycle, completing. Sixty years of living and learning and letting go, and this is what it looks like on an ordinary Sunday morning in March — a cleared bed, two things moved back to where they belong, and a room full of things still figuring out where they’re going.

I was just standing there appreciating the cleared surface. The small victory of it. Nothing dramatic. Nothing planned.

I looked up at the towel.

And for the first time in all the years I’ve owned it, let that shit go meant the actual shit. The physical stuff. The clutter. The things I’ve been holding onto in the material world the same way I used to hold onto things in the emotional one.

I laughed out loud. Because of course it does. Of course it always meant that too. I just wasn’t ready to hear that part until today.

That’s how it works, isn’t it. The wisdom doesn’t change. You change. And one day you look up at the same words you’ve been reading for years and they hand you something brand new.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I’ve always believed that. What I didn’t expect was that my teacher would be a hand towel hanging on a brass headrail in a room full of things I’m finally ready to let go of.

But here we are.

I’ve been working on letting go for some time now — of grief, of control, of what people said and did and didn’t do, of the version of myself who needed to hold all of it. And somewhere along the way, without making a plan or a project out of it, I started letting go of the stuff too. The physical weight of accumulated things I kept because I might need them, or someone gave them to me, or I just never got around to dealing with them.

The bed is clear.

Two things moved.

The towel still hanging on the headrail, still right, still true.

This is what the REAL Process looks like in real life.

Not as a concept I invented — as something I lived in a trailer at my folks’ house, in the middle of goodbye, with a hand towel on the wall and no idea what was coming.

Recognize what’s actually happening. Not what you think should be happening, not what you wish were happening — what’s true right now. For me that was a cleared surface, a quiet morning, and a towel I’ve owned for years suddenly saying something new.

Embrace it without making it a project. The decluttering didn’t start with a plan. It started with being tired of the weight of things. Both kinds.

Align with what’s clearing. The physical space and the emotional space are not separate. They never were.

Live it. One Sunday morning at a time. Two things moved. Bed still clear.

Let that shit go.

And she lived happily ever after.