The People Audit

I have a practice in Befriend Your Brain™ called I Audit. The premise is that if we don’t step back and look at our lives from a holistic perspective, we won’t see the forest for the trees. How can I know what my fitness self looks like if I don’t look at my work self and mom self? How can I attempt to insert a new meditation habit if I don’t first look at all the other habits I have stacked throughout my days? How will I know if where I live, what I’m eating, or who I’m spending time with is serving me if I don’t ask?

There's a particular kind of stickiness that happens when we dig into that last one. It happens anytime I do I Audit with a client. We can purge things. We can clear time. But people? If we remove people from our lives, doesn’t that just make us cold?

In short, no. Life gets full and there is not enough time to hold all of your stuff, let alone other people’s.

There is also the fact that relationships change as we age, and it has less to do with people growing apart and more to do with brains developing. When we're young, we don't have the capacity for big-picture thinking yet. We're just in each other's minutia — the daily, the immediate, the small.

I hear my daughter's conversations with her friends and there's no context, no bigger picture, just the right now.

Then we get older and our relationships expand — we hold both the minutia and the big picture together. And then we keep going, and our lives become so full of context, so layered with history and complexity and competing demands, that there comes a point where we genuinely cannot hold enough space for our own nuance and everyone else's.

That's when the breaking apart happens. Sometimes it's smooth. Sometimes it's sticky. Sometimes it’s downright dramatic. Sometimes it takes way too long to come to fruition. Sometimes it doesn’t happen because we don’t look at it — or don’t want to.

The mature move is to set a relationship down lovingly, before it gets ugly. Gently place it out of our lives or at least in an outer orbit. Before the resentment builds or the competition surfaces or the distance becomes a grievance. To say, with care: this was real, it served its purpose, and I'm not able to hold it anymore.

I was engaged once. Not to my husband. I was in my early 20s. We had just bought a house in Utah and were moving our young, fun, toned asses across the country from Pennsylvania to snowboard our days away. We got engaged in the shadows of the John Hancock building in downtown Chicago. He said sweet things. I said yes.

Two years later, we ended it. Over sushi and a cheers to a handful of great years together. 

When I tell this story people ask why we broke it off and I say that we had two different ideas on what life was. He did the adventure. He moved to Utah. He snowboarded daily. He bought the house. He was happy and fulfilled. Life was enough. 

I saw our Utah chapter as just that, a chapter. One in a long epic tome filled with adventure. He was ready to settle down and be done. I was just getting started. 

With my husband, I moved to Jordan and have gone to 13 new countries. We have lived in two states and two different countries so far together. We always have our eye on what’s next. We have a retirement plan that starts with “When we have our B and B in Thailand…”

The ex-fiance and I didn’t lack a good relationship. Together we laughed, adventured, pushed each other, had pets, became homeowners, chased powder, and supported each other. We also joined our families together. And setting each other down lovingly wasn’t as easy on them as it was on us. 

I remember in the weeks after we broke up, his mom called me to tell me that relationships can be hard. That they take work. That we should stick with it. But we knew.

I remember my mom telling me that she didn’t want me introducing anyone else into the family, because then they get attached and it’s too hard when they leave. “Don’t introduce another boyfriend unless you are sure you are going to marry them.”

Neither of our moms said these things out of malice or anger. They were hurt. Setting our partner down was hard and they voiced that. But we knew.

Now when I do an audit, I’m gentle but firm. We must audit not just the things and the calendar, but also the people. It’s not cold to move on from a relationship that is not serving you. It’s humane. For you, for them, for everyone involved, and for the collective conscious. 

When it is time to do your own audit, hold it lightly. Give yourself permission to set down what — and who — you need to. And trust that the people who are meant to stay will find a way.