At the end of my yoga class – feel free to play middle-class woman bingo at the back there – the teacher encourages us to breathe to the mantra “let go”. The phrase makes me tense. Let go of what? Where will it go? What if I can’t get it back? I don’t want to let go, the very words make me clench with dismay, partly because people have been telling me to relax and calm down and even – horribly – “chill” for years. As my son likes to observe, no one ever felt calmer for being told to calm down.
There are many reasons doubtless best explored in therapy for my distaste, but at least some of it relates to being curious and driven, coming from a family and culture that value activity and despise rest. I don’t want to do nothing. The idea of doing nothing makes me feel a little nauseous. You’re a long time dead, plenty of time hereafter for being at rest. That, my yoga teacher would say, is exactly why I need stillness. That’s why this is good for me.
So I lie there, in the peaceful bit at the end of the class that I understand most people enjoy, containing my urge to get on with things and waiting for it to be over, and I think about why “letting go” is meant to be desirable while “letting yourself go” is a failure. My grandmother used to speak disapprovingly of women – it was always women – who had let themselves go. Usually she meant they had gained weight, or gone out with hair and make-up inadequate to the occasion even if the occasion was a visit to the library. Sometimes housework had been let go. Looking back, it seems odd; like most of my family she had lifelong difficulty with body-size and appetite but my grandmother was a gloriously eccentric dresser, embracing patched jeans and hand-knits and bright colours from her middle age in the 1960s when older women in provincial England rarely wore trousers, let alone jeans. Her unintentionally-messy bun was often topped by her cat, who liked to ride around on people’s heads and shoulders and whom she saw no reason not to take to the shops that way. She was the first woman to return to work for the local council after having a baby in the late 1940s, enjoyed hiking and caravanning around parts of eastern Europe generally considered inaccessible in the 1950s and 60s, cooked food that was wildly exotic for her time and place with determination and enthusiasm, was in most ways no guardian of convention. And yet “letting yourself go” remained anathema.
Both “letting go” and “letting yourself go” seem to mean ceding control, but to “let go” is an act of discernment and grace while to “let yourself go” is to abandon discipline, usually discipline of the body. I remember friends commenting that I had “let” my hair go grey, as if the change in pigmentation came from a lapse of willpower. Even I don’t think I control the passage of time, nor my own body’s participation in that passage. My hair went grey. I decided that the cost of concealing the change was greater than the benefit. I try to let my appetite and the size of my body go, because the attempt to control them is catastrophic to my mental and physical health. I’ve never routinely worn make-up. Some days I don’t brush my hair. Nothing bad happens.
I was taught to avoid the ‘trap’ of cooking but I take pleasure in domestic life
I had my kids in my mid-20s, which was unheard of among women of my class and generation
Men are deemed more masculine for taking up more space, women more feminine for taking up less
Only mothers who find recognition in professional life seem to be guilty of ‘having it all’
There’s underlying privilege of course; as an older white woman in a majority-white country, I’m often almost invisible. Having always made my living by thinking, writing and teaching, age is no great threat to my professional life. But I think we often imagine that “letting ourselves go” would mean abject indolence and gluttony, that without discipline and surveillance we would consume everything and produce nothing, while “letting go” is a form of enlightenment. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that. “Letting go” seems to be private, invisible, something women can do in a yoga class without bothering anyone, where “letting yourself go” is visible, material, potentially disruptive. Maybe more of us should let ourselves go, see what happens.