11/04/2026
When we KNOW that we WANT to LEAVE but we CHOOSE to STAY … 😕
This THREAD has been YANKING my awareness for quite some time now … I have SACRIFICED exponentially throughout my earth life and I know from the DEPTHS of my own DUNGEONS and the SOUL SOJOURNS *WITH* MYSELF that I am STRUGGLING to TOLERATE people, places and things that once offered a SENSE of SAFETY for me…!!!
The REAL-EYES-ATION of the EXCHANGE that I’ve GIVEN hits my consciousness like a lightening bolt soo frequently and I am left asking myself “WHY?”
The COST is TOO EXPENSIVE NOW
The TAPESTRY is too FRAYED
The FREQUENCY has FRAZZLED beyond REPAIR
One word that has floated in and out of my awareness since I laid down to sleep last night is *DISREGARD* and it FITS with THIS sacred share … we IGNORE the SIGNALS from OUR SOUL that ILLUMINATE the IGNORANCE, AVOIDANCE, ABSENCE and even ABUSE from OTHERS … we FEEL *SOMETHING* for THEM and label it as *LOVE, FRIENDSHIP or CONNECTION* but WHAT IS IT BENEATH THE LENS???
BEYOND REPAIR through CHOICE is becoming THE WAY
CHOOSING the SACRED “NO”
ACCEPTING the SOVEREIGNTY of “YES”
Walk TOGETHER with your SOUL SIBLINGS or CHOOSE to walk ALONE
SEVER the SHACKLES that SUFFOCATE your SPIRIT
🛐🫶🏼🤍🫶🏼🛐
Most women know how to stay long past the point of wanting to. We were trained for it from childhood, keep the peace and don’t be the one who gives up. And for a long time this looks like a strength. The woman who held the marriage together through the impossible years or kept turning up for the difficult friend who gave nothing back. But there's a flip side to all that staying, and Ellen Goodman is pointing at it in this quote. She's asking what happens when staying becomes its own kind of avoidance and when the thing you're holding onto has already ended and you're just pretending it hasn't.
Goodman was a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who spent decades writing about how social change shows up in ordinary life. She covered politics and culture but always with an eye to the personal cost. She retired from her column in 2010 and went on to found an organisation dedicated to helping people talk about death. She was interested, in other words, in endings. In how we face them or don't. In this quote, she's identifying something that requires two kinds of courage- seeing that something is over and believing there's somewhere else to go.
The first kind of courage she mentions is perception. "It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a lifestage, a relationship, is over." The psychologist William Bridges wrote about this distinction. Change is external, he said, but transition is internal, and transitions always begin with an ending that must be fully acknowledged before anything new can start. We're bad at this part. We feel the deadness in a relationship but keep making plans for next summer or we stop caring about the job but keep showing up as if nothing has changed. There's a lag between something ending and us admitting it has ended, and the lag can last years.
I think the reason for the lag is that admitting something is over demands action. If you finally let yourself see that your friendship has been dying for years, you have to do something about it. You have to stop texting on birthdays, stop pretending and effortfully maintaining something that's already gone. Even if the thing is already dead, you're the one who has to stop pretending it's alive and that’s why we delay. We're waiting for someone else to do it, or for circumstances to do it for us. A redundancy, a move abroad or a crisis that makes it obvious. Anything but having to choose to walk away.
But Goodman's quote doesn't stop at seeing. She says letting go "involves a sense of the future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out." And that belief is harder to come by than it sounds. When you're in your fifties or sixties and something ends, the question of what comes next has a different weight than it did at thirty. At thirty you assume there's time but at fifty-five you're less sure. The fear is that you're not moving on to something new, you're just losing the last thing that made you feel like yourself. And then what? Who are you after the job, the marriage, and the role that defined you for twenty years?
That's the part where most od us get stuck. We can see that something is over and can even let go of it physically, leave the job, end the relationship. But the internal work of believing there's a future, that every exit line is an entry, requires a kind of confidence that doesn't come naturally to people who've spent their lives being useful to others. If you've always known who you are in relation to someone or something else, then leaving means not knowing anymore. And the faith Goodman is describing asks you to believe you'll become someone new on the other side of that not-knowing which is a lot to ask. Especially if you've been through enough endings that your trust in beginnings has faded.
The phrase that really resonates for me is "moving on, rather than out." Women are trained to see departure as rejection or failure. You didn't leave the marriage, you failed at it or you didn't move on from the job, you were pushed out. There's a grammar that makes leaving sound like losing. Goodman is trying to offer another grammar. One where leaving is a forward motion and going toward something. But language can only do so much. If you're standing at the edge of an ending and you can't see anything on the other side, no amount of reframing makes it feel like an entry. Sometimes you just have to step off without believing, and hope the belief comes later.
What Goodman is offering, I think, is a way of understanding endings that doesn't require certainty. "A sense of the future" doesn't mean knowing what comes next. It means believing that something does. And that belief can be more hope than conviction and it can wobble. The courage is in leaving without knowing, and staying oriented toward forward rather than back. Many women I know have done this at least once. Left something they should have left years earlier, with no idea who they'd be on the other side and they found out. Or they're still finding out. The belief, when it comes, comes from having done it before and survived.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: ellengoodman. com
