Thorns: Letting Go is Not a Loss

Every flower has its thorns. They’re sharp, uninviting, sometimes painful but they serve a purpose. They protect what is tender, what is still becoming.

For much of my life, I thought letting go meant losing. Releasing a relationship, a role, even a version of myself felt like failure like proof that I hadn’t held on tightly enough. What cancer and everything it unraveled taught me is that sometimes letting go isn’t weakness at all, It’s a kind of wisdom.

The thorn is not there to harm the flower, It’s there to honor its boundaries. In the same way, the endings and releases in our lives are not always about loss. They can be about preservation, they can be about growth and maybe they can be about protecting the bloom that’s still on its way.

Looking back from the other side of an intense 18-month treatment journey — one that awakened a clarity in me I never knew I had — I realized that survival isn’t only about what we manage to hold onto. It’s also about what we allow ourselves to set down.

Letting go of control.

Letting go of who I thought I had to be.

Letting go of the bitterness that could have stayed lodged in my chest.

None of that is loss, it’s the thorn doing its work and the pruning that allows for new petals to unfurl.

My invitation to you

What is one thing you’ve been afraid to release — not because it nourishes you, but because you’ve convinced yourself that letting go would mean losing?

What if the thorn is there not to wound you, but to free you?

🧡 Mary

This post is inspired by the “Bloom” chapter in my book, Flowers While You're Here.

You can also hear more of this story in Episode 1 of the Perspectives by Mary podcast.