Let the bundle fall

Not everything needs space in your life.

Jun 23, 2025

There are memories we bring with us like bundles of wet clothes: heavy, clinging, filled with things we never asked to hold. And yet, somehow, we picked them up. Learned to balance them on our heads. Moved carefully, afraid of letting anything spill. Convinced it was our job to carry it all, even if it was never really ours.

The image came to me, clear and unshakable.
A washerwoman—a lavadeira—kneeling by the river, surrounded by her own thoughts, tangled with stories that weren’t hers. I grew up seeing women like her in the folds of rural Brazil: they carry the bundles to the water, rinse and scrub each piece under the sun, then carry it all back again. Washing what isn’t theirs. Day after day.

And suddenly, I saw myself in her.
Not because the work belonged to me, but because I had taken it on as if it did.

The clothes weren’t mine.
The stories, not mine.
The guilt, the grief, the worn-out pieces of someone else’s past… not mine.
Still, I kept washing.
Still, I knelt at the edge of the river, scrubbing and scrubbing, hoping something might come clean.

But maybe that’s not the point.
Maybe there’s no need to stay in the mud, trying to fix what’s already fallen apart. No need to keep repeating a ritual for a story that’s already over.

Some clothes are too torn to be mended.
Some memories too stained to be saved.

Some burdens were never ours to carry in the first place.

And if you’ve ever felt this too, like you’re scrubbing someone else’s sorrow, tending to a pain that doesn’t belong to you, maybe this part is for you.

Sometimes the most freeing thing we can do is stop.

Look around.
Notice the field behind you, full of light.
The breeze brushing the water.
The sky above you, steady and open.

And the body, tired from years of trying to make sense of what was never fair, starts to whisper: you don’t have to keep doing this.

You can set it down.
Let the bundle fall.
Let it roll behind you, not as an act of forgetting, but as a way to return—to yourself, to now, to a life that doesn’t need you to carry proof of what you survived.

Forgiveness, maybe, isn’t about the other person at all.
Maybe it’s about standing taller.
Breathing deeper.
Choosing peace.

There’s a river still flowing.
And this time, it doesn’t ask for effort.
Only presence.

Let it go.
Deixa pra lá.