I didn’t pick this book up with any great plan. I’d just sent mine out into the world, and I suppose I was looking for something familiar – something that once held me. What I found instead was an echo. Not of my writing, but of my wounds. This piece isn’t about comparison. It’s about how, sometimes, two very different voices can name the same ache. And how healing, when it’s honest, always finds its way back to itself.

What Two Very Different Books Taught Me About Letting Go

I wasn’t looking for it.

I had just come through the fire of publishing Codex Liberatus – a deeply personal book that had taken years to shape, fracture, and reassemble. I thought I was done sitting with my ghosts for a while.

And then, out of nowhere, I found myself pulling a book off my shelf that I hadn’t touched in years: Heidi Priebe’s This Is Me Letting You Go.

No intention. No agenda. Just an old itch I couldn’t name.

I remember reading it the first time – racing through its raw confessions like someone skimming a stranger’s diary. It felt almost too intimate, too exposed. But now, years later, I read it more slowly. With quieter eyes. With scars of my own.

And this time, it landed differently.

We all grieve differently, but the ache is universal

Priebe writes like someone who has lived through fire and still smells of smoke. Her book isn’t neatly structured or tidy – it bleeds. It weeps. It sounds like midnight voicemails never sent, or the kind of letters you write but never post.

I, on the other hand, wrote Codex Liberatus like someone sifting through ashes – trying to make meaning out of what burned. The language is slower. More meditative. Less about the heartbreak itself, more about what heartbreak reveals.

But reading This Is Me Letting You Go again made me realise something humbling:
We’re speaking to the same wound.
We’re just whispering in different directions.

Two paths, same ache

One day, I paused at this line of hers:

“Sometimes the hardest part isn’t letting go but learning to start over.”

It stopped me cold. Not because it was new. But because it was familiar.

I had written something eerily close in Codex Liberatus long before re-reading her work:

Chapter 30: The Echoes of Becoming
“At some point, the wound is no longer theirs – it’s yours for staying.”

It’s uncanny, isn’t it? Two different writers, unaware of each other’s breath, arriving at the same quiet truth:

Letting go isn’t about the other person.
It’s about yourself.
And the decision to stop bleeding for a story that’s already ended.

When you’re ready, the language will find you

Priebe’s book feels like the voice of someone holding your hand through the breakup, the betrayal, the loss.
Mine feels more like the friend who returns after the storm, sits with you in silence, and asks, “Now what?”

I think we need both.

Some readers will need her fire. Others will need my stillness. And many, I suspect, will need both – just at different points in their journey.

This is not a comparison. It’s a kind of kinship.

Let me be clear: this isn’t me saying one book is better, or wiser, or more profound.

It’s me acknowledging that emotional truth has many accents. And healing speaks in multiple dialects – some sharp and urgent, others slow and contemplative.

Sometimes we heal by yelling into the night.
Sometimes we heal by naming the silence.

Both books gave me something. Both books made me feel less alone in different ways.
And if you, dear reader, are somewhere in between the pain and the becoming, maybe one of these voices will meet you where you are.

*Images used for representative purposes only