you can just leave

life lessons from an avoidant

My father passed away when I was thirteen. This isn’t what the following is about, so walk with me.

I don’t talk about it publicly, I rarely write about it. Partially because the line between living with grief and letting it swallow both your personality and your art is a little too Ozempic-thin for my liking, but mostly because I’m still, a decade and some years later, not sure how I’m supposed to feel about that. One would like to believe a parent’s passing at your tender age makes you wise —we need to extract benefit from tragedy to preserve both dignity and the will to live— but I think it just made me confused, which is a boring trope. What’s not boring, though, is that it made me an excellent leaver, permanently engraving self-sufficiency onto the tombstone of naivete. If your ears are just as tired of hearing about the eldest daughter syndrome, let me introduce you to its extremist dropout sibling: the dead parent effect.

Grief at a young age changes you. Not just via unsolicited condolences but by reinforcing two sinister truths: first, if our very means of protection and care can perish on a random Tuesday afternoon, we can rely on ourselves only, and, second, if the terror of unpredictability is inevitable, I can at least make sure I’m betting on myself in every scenario. To take on life with both immediacy and agency requires detachment, which is easily accessible to women who get unprecedented, existential loss before they get their first period. So, I suppose this is where a certain psyche swing took place from belonging to independence, akin to Beauvoir’s immanence and transcendence¹ — the ritual and the exploration, the habitual and the novel, the staying and the leaving, a promise of certainty or no promise at all — with life happening at the interplay of both. When you watch protection slip right through your fingers in helpless agony, you have two options: let the world wash you away with it, powerless, or you can become a swimmer of such caliber that surviving the world’s worst flood is a routine task. You can guess which one it was.

Fast forward to adulthood, where free will is abundant, disputes are many, with the horrors lurking underneath acquiring capital, you learn to have your cake and eat it too. So here I am, an anchorless, untethered leaver with a spine so willing it could deadlift 350 pounds if it wasn’t so stiff. A floating balloon that expands with mileage. Having experienced the darker side of self-reliance, I somehow gained an urge to build myself up from ruins, but also an unequivocal permission to leave whatever doesn’t sit right with me even for a second. So much so that there’s five countries in my residence history, six industries on my CV, and an undisclosed number of people that never got a text back. It’s a sport for the sick and twisted, I’m an elite athlete. I leave because the first time I got left was permanent and brutal.

nicole kidman’s divorce photo (the origin of which she debunked! but idc)

If you’re a fan of therapy jargon, you’ll sign me off as dismissive avoidant and call it a day. But let’s be more poetic. I’m a slippery fish. I’ll block, I’ll flee, I’ll book that flight, I’ll unsolder whatever metal has my ankles chained to the ground, I’ll vanish in an instant and won’t crawl back even on a rare occasion I get so lonely I start regretting my doings. I don’t leave in apathetic coldness — I’ll grieve in my own way in a world they don’t get to witness. I know that I’m the architect of this tiny little playing field called life, responsible for what happens to me to a fault, and for my joy too. Everything matters so much it goes haywire and converges over the meridian where it stops being of importance eventually, so why be in a situation even for an hour where you’re not enjoying yourself? Can’t afford hesitation, can’t pay off miserable continuity debt when all it does is oxidize the body. Leaving is almost too easy when you don’t form attachments the way a healthy person would. It’s therapeutic, familiar, arranged in virtue and violence and a little dancing. I’m obsessed with leaving the same way people are obsessed with Excel spreadsheets or French skincare. Not as an ultimatum with an agenda (That’ll show ‘em! Teach a lesson!), but as an act of agency with nothing to prove (I hope they’re happy & I hope to never hear about it.)

the ethics of leaving

We tell ourselves mythical stories to ease the tragedy of life, and we’ve all got our favorites. Mine is that leaving is good for me. I’m still yet to be proven wrong — combing through relationships, employers, friendships, places retroactively, I can tell you with sheer honesty that I have only ever regretted not leaving sooner. No need for coin tossing when it’s a numbers game. At the same time, I’m careful about preaching leaving as yet another individualist fetch. We’re already isolated beyond repair into submission, where “setting boundaries” and “prioritizing yourself” are just encoded absolution of guilt in turning your back away from those who need you, dividing us further into singular labor units in which we can get high and wet and horny on consumerism and excessive productivity, benefitting the top of the pyramid and leaving each other empty-handed and unstable. That’s not at all what I stand for, so let me reinstate: I don’t leave when I’m inconvenienced or when things are difficult. I leave when inconvenience turns to self-harm — once the scale tips and the cost of staying outweighs the pain of parting ways. To leave is to remove myself from places that are hurting me, using me, hindering me — I don’t think that’s an inherently capitalist idea in this capacity. In fact, I think it’s something young women should exercise more. Because, well, we’re mostly told to do the opposite.

I have observed the people in my life, particularly the women I love, trapped in situations that seal their heart and soul in tupperware, and the mental gymnastics it takes to leave a thing. Of course, I sympathize: I am the ill exception, not the rule. So much negotiation and bargaining with self, knuckles black and blue. For the most part, I found, the doubt is either fear of loneliness or fear of the unknown. I’d like to softly tell you that if you want to leave, you’re already alone. If you’re unhappy, you’ve been knee deep in the unknown the whole time. You think great pain awaits you upon leaving, but aren’t you in great pain of pretending anyway? You have to climb over the picket fence where the worst is over and the grass is maybe greener on the neighbors’ lawn. Let yourself lay on the greener grass.

One could argue that leaving has a selfish bone. I disagree. To leave is to be okay with a gnawing absence with no promise of a better prospect in place, which is a little death in itself. There is more humility than pride here. It is also to accept your inevitable replacement — I leave because I know I’m dispensable and someone else is sure to occupy the space, today or tomorrow. The world won’t stop turning and my departure is hardly a disaster. Leaving is selfish when it’s done for retribution, which would imply I’m bluffing to impose pain on the other, to spoon-feed vendetta, as though the story is not yet over and pending improvement or a reckoning. But I’m only walking away to save myself. My sorrow is profound but private, between me and my leaving, not for display or purchase.

when you know, you know

The path from staying to leaving is a steep one. It’s a rupture in conformity. While Didion said it’s easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends², I’d have to respectfully disagree: an ending can be as evident as a car crash on a sleepless night. Once set in motion, no apologies, improvements, or roundabouts can turn the clock back. What you once knew as your good and gracious reality has ceased to be one with no warning, and suddenly you can hardly stand to be awake, let alone seek happiness or joy in there. Sure, it takes time to bubble up; dissatisfaction is a boiling pot of stale air. The tossing and turning, head hitting the pillow more lifeless than the night before. But there’s a threshold, and once the need to leave has ripened into something whole, a fruit to be verbalized or eaten, once contentment puts on a longing suit, you know it’s time for a blood sacrifice. You can’t look away. That you’ve begged and borrowed and maybe repaid in full, and the voice is still pulling you out of your body. Go, go, go. The court has come to a decision, not by your rational thinking or drafting up the pros and cons, but by some benevolent power that has the answer to the question you’ve been too afraid to ask. Maybe the Universe, maybe common sense, maybe insomnia. It doesn’t have to be spiritual to be obvious. To suffer on, or to surrender?

There was this boy I left once. I’d grown to love him, but also to find he had a mean streak and an affinity for insults, so my affection suffered corrosion. I got up early that day, still quite sure about us, watched his innocent sleeping face antithetical to the malicious words he would throw my way when awake, a peaceful cherub. Hesitant to wake him up, I wondered why. I realized then I could only be happy when he's asleep or away. Which is not far from wishing somebody was dead. I got dressed, left a note, took the train home, and blocked him on everything. White paint over the chipping wallpaper, no confrontation, no begging for kindness spare change, no yelling. Sometimes leaving is just a train ticket to nothingness, true and needed.

Leaving is a muscle that grows damn well with no pre-workout, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It only takes a few blind jumps before an intolerance for dissatisfying continuity develops, and walking away is a frictionless path. As in, the more you leave, the less it takes to leave again. Quitting my job earlier this month upon surpassing my limit of boredom and stagnancy, I knew to write down what I was going to say: without a rehearsed eulogy, my resignation wouldn’t make sense, as I like to get shit done, cause no trouble, and complain very little. Imagine saying something as uninspired and trivial as “Dunno, I think I’m just bored here” in a corporate exit interview, the same place where speaking of your efforts and dedication with the conviction of somebody saving a thousand lives per day is the norm. I know that people say no job is perfect and will satisfy me in every way, I told my now ex-manager, but I want to give myself the grace to find out if that’s true. And maybe I didn’t have to go. Maybe I could grind it out. Maybe it was just a case of not enough sleep, bad posture, or a vitamin deficiency. I could’ve waited for things to get worse or better or remain the same, but now we’ll never know. I wasn’t curious enough to see what happens if I just push a little harder or wait a little longer. The tree branch had broken off. I also just don’t buy into the lie that hating our circumstances is a natural part of the human condition, something to endure. No promise is lucrative enough when you have to force yourself out of bed every morning.

lights, camera, leaving

I don’t have a framework or the right to tell you where to stay or what to leave. To dump a mean taker or get a job that pays better or suits your essence more, to leave a friend group that makes you anxious and frantic. Those are your choices to make — only you know what’s right in the context you occupy. My leaving policy comes from trauma and is extreme and ruthless, near toying with morality at times, decapitating certainty at a great cost. I wouldn’t want you to live by it — I may as well regret it all when I’m older. But since you’ll have a million people tell you to remain where you are, to sacrifice, to endure, to wait it out, that your doubt is sinful and your dissatisfaction narcissistic, maybe you could use some tough love from an avoidant. If so much of life is walking in a straight line with only a rough estimate of where your feet will land, walking away from something and toward another thing are hardly different ventures. In fact, we couldn’t trace where one ends and the other starts with certainty. It’s a gamble, but so is everything in life when you’re breathing and graceful. Carried forward in the same body that once stood still in quicksand, you’re only seeking permanence that lives within you and has never left. The unknown is something to get curious about. And would you? If there was no punishment, would you? If there was a promise of a better morning, would you? If no one in the world could judge from the tribunal or call you selfish, would you? Sometimes you gotta take Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten at face value. So there’s your answer, I guess. You weigh it out a billion times, you analyze, assess, you flip a coin. But you know already and I don’t need to say another word. If you’re going to leave, leave kindly, leave softly, hard things and easy things, leave breathless and trembling, starving or hastily, but never yourself. Leaving yourself is the worst thing one can do. Allegedly. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never done it — the greatest gift my father gave me.

1. Simone de Beauvoir — The Second Sex

2. Joan Didion — Goodbye to all that