What the Trees Know About Letting Go

There was a scene in a movie I watched recently that made me pause.

The main character was arriving at a grand event - celebrity style. Hundreds of photographers, flashing lights from every direction. Models and people in the industry moving through the frenzy of it. The camera kept cutting from one face to another as they made their way along the walkway. 

And for just a moment, I felt deeply uncomfortable. I think because I realized that I no longer recognized myself in it.

Let me explain: Two decades ago, I would have wanted that. Not necessarily the fame, but that feeling of being seen, the occasion, the presenting of yourself to the world as something polished and whole. I understood that language fluently once.

Like most women I knew, material things mattered. The shoes, the clothes, the purses, the accessories, the full face… I wore it all with joy and there is nothing wrong with that. Those things made me feel beautiful.

I want to say that clearly, because what came after wasn't a rejection of who I was then. It was simply... a season changing.

I remember smiling recently at a very specific memory: that younger version of me would not have left the house in a dress without heels on. Not for anything. Grocery shopping, a quick errand - didn't matter. It was part of how I moved through the world and it felt right, because at the time, it was right.

Today, I wear the same casual dress with flip flops, and let me tell you, they come off the moment I walk through the door. I love being barefoot. It makes me feel like I can breathe.

Somewhere along the way, quietly and without announcement, I started letting things go. Most of the purses were given away. The shoes I kept are rarely touched. The jewelry sits in a box. The makeup became eyeliner if I felt like it, mascara sometimes, and almost always, just a swipe of lipstick or lip gloss.

Hair in a ponytail. A casual dress. Flip flops. That's it.

The younger me would have a heart attack. The me now gently smiles at her, with so much love.

I've been thinking about what that shift actually is. What to call it. How to make sense of it without making the old version of myself wrong, and without making the new version sound like she has it all figured out.

And then I thought about trees.

A tree doesn't keep every leaf forever. At some point, what once helped it grow becomes too heavy to carry into the next season. The leaves served beautifully: they caught the light, they fed the roots, they made the tree what it became. And then, without grief, they were released.

The tree doesn't miss them. It simply stands quieter, more bare, more itself, and waits for what comes next.

That's what I think happened to the heels. The purses. The full face before leaving the house.

They were my leaves. They caught the light of a season I needed to live through. They helped me become something. And then, slowly and naturally they fell away. Something quieter started to matter more.

Comfort. Peace. The feeling of being at home inside myself. Sunsets instead of city noise. Flip flops instead of heels. A home in a quiet neighborhood, good friends, animals nearby, and the kind of stillness that used to make me restless but now feels like everything.

I stopped dressing for the noise of the world and started dressing for the feeling of being me.

I believe all of us will go through seasons. Different versions of ourselves will arrive and, eventually, ask to be released. Some will carry heels and bright lights and beautiful, heavy things. Others will arrive softer, more at home in their own skin.

Let them all come.Let them all go when it's time.

And if you're in a season of shedding right now - if things that once excited you are starting to feel like too much to carry, please know that that’s not you losing yourself. That's you growing into yourself.

Every version of you, even the ones you eventually outgrow, deserved to exist. They each brought you here. Trust the one that's emerging now. She knows something the others didn't yet.

And the roots beneath all of it, those are yours to keep. 🌻

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Is there something you've gently grown out of - not with regret, but with a quiet kind of peace? I'd love to hear it.