The Decade of Letting Things Go

The Decade of Letting Things Go is a book of linked essays containing still-relevant experiences that take place after the age of becoming socially and/or professionally invisible, as the author searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance among a growing list of losses. The decade contains many of lifes expected losses: of pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places; plus the loss of identities: child, student, partner, "successful" author. Some of late lifes experiences arent so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get you to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in 30-year-old #MeToo incidents; "hooking up" with a "boy" from your teenaged past; struggling to accept that lifelong sexual dysfunction will never wane; realizing a deeply trusted mentor from 45 years ago might be declining into dementia when he claims 6-year-old girls are being forced to run races to put condoms on erect penises; plus a lifelong attachment to a childhood wound of having a "preferred child" as a sibling. And theres the apparent loss of hope: for ever finding contentment in the mark one makes in the world or for ever forming an identity that brings contentment. Except that these latter two have no expiration date, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.