About My Memoir
Letting Her Go
On a June morning in 1998, fourteen-year old Greyson Kirby wakes up on her parents’ idyllic farm in southern Virginia with no idea that she is about to lose the one person she can’t imagine her life without; her father. His sudden death sets the stage for a decade of grasping and releasing, as Greyson struggles to understand her loss and find her place in the world.
From the opulent plaid halls of Ralph Lauren’s corporate office in Manhattan to the violent decadence of a villa in the Hamptons; from the hollow frozen skyscrapers of Chicago to the lush beauty of Italy, she must constantly confront the question;
Where is home?
Is it a place? an amount of money? a storied career? a beautiful foreign country?
an ancient spiritual tradition? the perfect beloved? a family? a set of ideas?
Is home something we build or something we find?
To which worlds do we truly belong?
Only a few years out of college, Greyson lands her dream job in a multi-million dollar design company; traveling the world from Brazil to Peru, Nepal to Bhutan, weaving her life from airports to trains, from the rich green of the Italian countryside back to the rolling hills of her hometown.
It is only when she has everything in life she has longed for—the perfect job, the perfect man, that she realizes she has become an imposter in her own skin, unwilling to loosen the corset of perfectionism so tightly wound around her own chest. It is there, between the painful betrayals of family and the breathtaking simplicity of an extended trip to Bali, that she allows herself to let go once again. In the painful decisions that follow, Greyson learns to follow the lines of her true passion, intuition and inner magic, learning to name and claim her deepest self.
We are given no maps to navigate the territories of love or family or home, we must make them for ourselves. To let go asks us excavate our inherited beliefs, to find new heroes and guides, to accept that our lives are much more than the identities we imagine, the beliefs we inhabit and the relationships we inherit.
Letting Her Go is about empowering yourself to speak your truth, all the way, all the time. It’s about trusting your inner compass and letting go of the lies you tell yourself. It is about about escaping the trap of a half-lived life, and how the hardest journey you ever take is the one that demands that you turn and face the mirror, and make peace with who you find there. It is the story of learning to let go of the thousand versions of who you think you are supposed to be, to question everything, to step through the invisible doors inside yourself that have been closed for so long. It is about our hidden capacity for self-healing and the bravery it takes to travel beyond the boundaries of who we were raised to be, so we can discover who we truly are.