Where Did ‘Let Them’ Come From? 🎁
#Years before Mel Robbins published her best-selling self-help book, a struggling writer posted a poem with a similar message.
By Olga Khazan, The Atlantic.
The year 2020 was a bad one for Cassie Phillips. Her husband had recently returned from an overseas deployment, and while he was away, she told me, she’d rarely heard from him. The pandemic began, and the family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where they didn’t know many people. Phillips felt isolated in her new home, and her marriage was falling apart.
Late at night, on her computer, she started writing out some lines—“If they want to go weeks without talking to you, LET THEM”; “If they want to follow the crowd, LET THEM”—to remind herself that she couldn’t control her husband’s behavior. The writing was an attempt to “get through the day knowing I didn’t have anybody but myself,” Phillips said; she was “learning not to give up on other people, but understanding I had to trust myself.”
The phrase Let them wasn’t entirely Phillips’s own invention—she was inspired, in part, by a video clip in which Tyler Perry’s character Madea says, “If somebody wants to walk out of your life, let them go.” In 2022, Phillips left her husband and got the words let them tattooed on her arm, with the L in print and the rest in cursive. She posted a picture of the tattoo on Facebook, along with the lines she had been writing—she calls them a series of mantras, but many people refer to them as a poem. That post went viral, for a poem at least; currently, it has nearly 50,000 shares.
Phillips saw people reposting the poem on Facebook and Instagram, and even screen-printing it on T-shirts. She thought that was cool, but it didn’t occur to her to try to make money from the “Let them” idea. At the time, she was working at a nursing home and as a bartender, taking care of her kids, and trying to hold it together psychologically. “I was in survival mode,” Phillips said.