Learning to Feel Safe Without Holding On

Letting go of the life that once protected me and discovering a different kind of security.

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For most of my life, safety meant having enough. Enough money. Enough stability. Enough proof that everything wouldn’t suddenly fall apart again.

A year ago, I would have told you I finally felt secure. I had a beautiful apartment I loved, a strong career, savings in the bank, and for the first time in years, I had stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop. I thought I had healed.

What I didn’t realize was that I hadn’t healed at all. I had just built enough protection around myself that I no longer had to feel the wound.

When I was a sophomore in college, I studied abroad for the spring semester. I was traveling constantly, seeing the world for the first time, completely unaware that my family, already fragile, was quietly collapsing back home.

They made the decision not to tell me. They wanted to protect the experience I was having.

When I came home, my dad was in rehab. We had lost our house. My belongings were packed into storage boxes, and my mom and I were staying in a friend’s home. I lived there for a few weeks before leaving for a summer internship in New York.

At the time, I didn’t slow down enough to process what had happened. I didn’t grieve the loss of stability or the shock of realizing that something I had relied on could disappear overnight.

Instead, something inside me made a decision. I will never let this happen to me again.

That moment changed the course of my life. I had always planned on going to law school, but suddenly that path felt dangerous. Years of loans, delayed income, dependence on the future working out. I started looking for careers I could enter immediately after graduation, something stable, something that paid well.

I reorganized my entire life around earning and independence. I consolidated my class schedule and stopped treating school as my primary focus. I drove Uber when it first launched in my college town, chasing promotions and convincing friends to sign up so we could both earn bonuses. I bartended, hostessed, waitressed. I learned how to run Facebook ads and sold monthly retainers to local businesses. I worked for a startup in New York whenever I could.

At the time, it looked like ambition. Looking back, it was protection.

I had learned that safety could be built. If I worked hard enough, earned enough, planned carefully enough, nothing could be taken from me again.

In my mid-twenties, it seemed like the plan had worked. I was living in New York with a boyfriend who was older and more established. I had a great job at Peloton, a beautiful apartment, and a life that felt stable in a way younger me desperately wanted.

I remember thinking: I did it. I’m safe now.

But when that relationship ended a few years later, I realized how fragile that safety actually was. None of the furniture was mine. I couldn’t afford the apartment on my own. I had never signed my own lease.

The feeling that washed over me was immediate and familiar. The same panic I felt at twenty years old when I came home and realized my home was gone.

With support from my family and from him, I moved into my own apartment. Something I could afford myself. I furnished it piece by piece. Silverware, pots and pans, sheets, furniture – every item chosen carefully, intentionally.

As each piece came together, I felt my nervous system settle.

I remember thinking, I will never be displaced again. I didn’t just build a home. I built armor.

Over the next few years, my career continued to grow. My income increased. My savings grew. And slowly, I stopped living in survival mode.

By thirty-one, I believed I had finally created the safety I had been chasing for more than a decade. I loved my apartment. It felt like an anchor — proof that I had made it through.

What I didn’t realize was that my sense of safety was still rooted in circumstance. If anything destabilized — my job, my income, my environment — so would I. I hadn’t healed the fear. I had just learned how to outrun it.

This past year brought more change than I expected. I decided to pivot my career, start my own company, and step into uncertainty in almost every area of my life. Old stories resurfaced immediately — Who am I to do this? What if everything falls apart?

But I still had my apartment, and that gave me comfort.

Until I realized it no longer made sense for me to stay. The rent had increased dramatically. My life was changing. Logically, moving was the right decision.

And yet my body reacted with pure panic.

I couldn’t understand why letting go of a space felt so terrifying — until I realized what it represented. This apartment wasn’t just where I lived. It was the symbol of everything I had built to protect myself from the past.

Over the past year, I’ve been learning that real safety doesn’t come from jobs, partners, or homes. When we outsource our security to circumstances, we are only safe as long as those circumstances remain unchanged. Protection helped me survive. But it was never meant to be permanent.

As layers of identity began to fall away, I realized I needed to shift my sense of safety inward — into something that couldn’t be taken away. The hardest step was the last one.

Instead of signing another lease, I chose to put my belongings into storage and travel. I considered keeping the apartment as a home base, but I had promised myself I would stop making decisions from fear. And staying would have been exactly that.

The weeks leading up to moving, I felt physically sick. Grief surfaced that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel for years. Grief for the home we lost, for the instability I never processed, for the younger version of me who learned too early that nothing was guaranteed.

I had spent years moving straight into survival. I had never slowed down enough to feel.

A few days before my lease ended, something small happened that felt strangely meaningful.

When I first moved into this apartment, a close friend brought me a lucky bamboo plant. It lived in water on my windowsill and somehow thrived for four years, which is far longer than most do.

After I asked for a sign that I was making the right decision, the plant began to turn brown. Slowly, then all at once, it started to wilt.

I learned later that most lucky bamboo plants live one or two years in those conditions. Mine had lived for four.

It had grown as I had grown here. And now, it was finished too.

I moved out this past weekend, and what I feel most now is relief. For the first time, safety doesn’t feel tied to a place or a paycheck or a version of my life staying exactly the same. It feels quieter than that. Less dramatic.

I once believed healing meant ensuring nothing could ever fall apart again. Now I understand something different. Real safety is knowing that even if it does, I will still have myself.

That I can love what a chapter gave me without needing to hold onto it forever. That letting go is not losing — it is making space. That I don’t need to see the entire road ahead to take the next step.

For years, I healed by protecting myself.

Now, I am learning to heal by trusting.

With love,

Marissa