Leave? Stay? Either way, this one thing needs to change.

Leaving is hard.

Staying is hard.

Whichever one you choose, one thing is for sure. Something needs to change. And its you.

When you don’t make the change(s) that you know are necessary, you end up with the same thing.

We hope things will just magically change when we leave or when we stay in something that we know needs to change.

But how do you know when its time to leave or when you should stay and fight.

When you don't make the change you know is necessary, you don't get something new. You get the same thing, wearing a different outfit. New apartment, same avoidance. New partner, same pattern. New job, same version of you showing up late to your own life. There’s a common common denominator and its you. There's that quote everyone attributes to Einstein, something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results being the definition of insanity. We treat the exit or the entrance like it's the whole solution, when really it's just the setting. The character (you) is still the problem, or still the answer, depending on the day.

Part of why this is so confusing is that most of us didn't grow up with a healthy model of either choice. We grew up with slogans.

"Stay together for the kids."

"Marriage is forever, no matter what."

"Things will get better once you buy the house."

"Once we have the baby, it'll bring us closer."

"Once we move, once the money's better, once he gets a new job, once she finally grows up."

We were handed staying as a moral position before we were ever taught to ask whether the thing we were staying in was actually good for us. Nobody sat us down and said, "here's how you tell the difference between commitment and self-abandonment." They just said stay and implied that leaving was the failure, the thing that broke families instead of the thing that sometimes saves people inside them.

So we absorbed this idea that tolerance is the same as love. That the length of time you can allow something is proof. And we absorbed the second half of that message too that the "things will change when" half, which is maybe even more damaging, because it teaches you to outsource your happiness to a future event instead of a present decision. It'll get better when we buy the house. It'll get better when the baby comes. It'll get better when he gets that promotion, when she finally deals with her stuff, when the timing is right. It’ll change when we get married. We were taught to wait for circumstances to fix what only a person can actually fix. And circumstances never do. The house gets bought and the same two people live in it, unchanged. The baby arrives and now there are just more hours in the day to avoid the conversation you needed to have anyway.

Look, I know this because I'm a leaver. I want to be precise about that, because "leaver" gets confused with "quitter" and they are not the same. A quitter leaves when it gets hard. A leaver, the kind I'm talking about leaves when it's finished. I've left relationships, a marriage, left places I loved and jobs that paid me well, and not because I ran out of effort, but because I ran out of evidence. I gave those things everything I had, and at some point the data came back clear: this isn't going to make me happy, no matter how much more of myself I pour into it. Leaving, for me, has never been about giving up. It's been about refusing to keep performing devotion to something that's already told me, quietly and repeatedly, that it's over and refusing to wait around for a "when" that was never actually coming.

Here’s what I’ve been realizing lately. The hard part isn't leaving. I've gotten good at leaving. The hard part is staying, staying in something and actually trying, because some deep, unglamorous part of you knows it's worth staying for. This is what my second book is about.

And I know that feeling too. You know, the one where you stayed even though it was uncomfortable, even though everything in you wanted to bolt at the first sign of friction and then… you got the win. The breakthrough. The moment on the other side of the hard conversation where something actually shifted, where the two of you built something you couldn't have built if you'd left six months earlier. I know what it feels like to be so glad you stayed. Not because staying was easy, but because you stayed with yourself through the hard part. You didn't abandon yourself the second it got uncomfortable, no, you fought through the pain to get to the good, and the good was real, and it was only there because you didn't leave when it first got difficult.

That's the distinction I keep having to relearn: you don't stop when it gets hard. Hard is not the signal. Hard is just hard. It's growth and friction. It's supposed to be uncomfortable, because change always is. You keep going through hard.

What you don't do is keep going through harm.

You stop when it's stripping you down instead of building you up.

You stop when it's confusing you, when you no longer trust your own perception of what's happening.

You stop when it's depleting you faster than it's ever going to replenish you.

You stop when it's hurting you in the ways that don't heal into strength, only into smaller and smaller versions of yourself.

So how do you know? How do you know if you're supposed to leave, or if you're supposed to stay and fight and how do you know if that instinct is even yours, or just the echo of a rule you were handed in your early childhood years?

I don't think there's a formula. But I've noticed a difference between the ache that comes from neglect and the ache that comes from depletion. Neglect is when something good has been left untended, you stopped watering it, stopped showing up, stopped doing the unglamorous maintenance that any life or relationship or job needs to survive. That ache is usually solvable. It's asking you to change, not to leave. Depletion looks and feels different. That's the ache that remains even after you've given everything, tried every version of yourself, done the work, had the hard conversations. That ache isn't asking you to try harder. It's telling you the well is dry, and no amount of digging is going to find water that isn't there. And no house, no baby, no "when," is going to refill it either.

The reality is though, both of them feel like exhaustion. Both of them feel like "I can't do this anymore."

Whichever one you choose, you don't get to skip the part where you change. If you leave and you haven't changed, you'll build the same life again with a new cast of characters. I've watched myself do it. New city, same self-abandonment. New relationship, same inability to ask for what I need until it's too late. Leaving without changing is just moving the furniture around in a room you still hate.

And if you stay without changing, you don't get relief either. You get a longer, slower version of the same erosion, just with better excuses for why you haven't left yet.

So maybe the real question was never "leave or stay." Maybe it's "what has to become different in me, regardless of what I do with the walls around me and whose voice am I actually listening to when I decide."

Choose your hard. Leaving or staying.

But just remember that the person who has to change is the only variable in the equation you actually control. You're the one who has to decide whether you're going to keep standing in the rain, waiting for it to change on its own, or finally build yourself an umbrella.

And if you do stay, stay through the discomfort, not the harm, you might just get to feel, someday, so glad you did.