I haven't been putting Substacks on my website log ever since I've been restacking on Substack itself, but this one resonated with me that it only felt right to share it.
I think there's a certain attachment and familiarity to what you already know. It's strange to hike into the unknown, unsure of what is to come. Part of it can be pondering of whether that unknown is better than what you already know. I'd probably say that you'll never know unless you get yourself out of the room to find out. Easier said than done...
The time between knowing and doing. The long hallway between intuition and motion. It’s about the soul’s strange attachment to places it has already outgrown, and the emotional physics of rooms that should have been vacated years ago but still smell faintly like home.
It's often self-sabotaging of us to imagine that staying in rooms that already hurt us can be a form of love. "Don't mess it up. Don't change what you know." Maybe leaving is the ultimate form of self-love.
We don’t often talk about the sacredness of staying. About how lingering, despite logic, despite pain, despite the bruising repetition of unmet needs, can be an act of love. Sometimes, we stay out of devotion. Out of commitment to a promise we made before we understood what the promise would cost. Sometimes, we stay because we still believe something holy might be salvaged. And that’s not delusion; that’s a form of faith.
To leave a room that once made us feel safe is to kill the fantasy that safety can be permanent.
There will never be a perfect time to leave and to go. So go with whatever you have now and see what happens :)
I don’t believe in reinvention anymore. I believe in retrieval. In becoming again the one you were before the room made you smaller.
So when you do go, and I hope you do, go with your flaws, your doubts, your boxes still unpacked. Go messy. Go late. Go unprepared. Go with nothing but the whisper that you were meant for air.
Because if there’s anything waiting on the other side, it’s not perfection. It’s breath. It’s possibility. It’s a room with light. And maybe, if you’re lucky, a window.
