Mmmk, so I know you know the thing doesn't fit anymore, and you've probably known longer than you'd like to admit.
So... why are you still there?
...
And I'm sorry, that question sounds way more judgmental than I mean it to, but I have firsthand experience with the answer.
Leaving means admitting something. And sometimes we'd rather reorganize our entire lives around making something work than admit we might have been wrong about it.
Especially when we were really sure.
You know the kind of sure I'm talking about. You told people about it. You made plans around it. You invested money in it. You invested years in it. You said things like, “This is what I'm supposed to be doing.”
Bonus points if you also told everyone this was what God was calling you to do.
Well.
Now we really can't change our minds, can we?
Because changing direction doesn't just affect the future. It can make us start interrogating the past.
Did I get it wrong? Did I waste all that time? What was I doing for the last five years?
And suddenly staying another six months sounds considerably easier than answering any of those questions.
This is where I think pride can look very different from what we expect. When I hear pride, I think arrogant. Big ego. Someone who has to be the smartest person in the room.
But pride can also look like refusing to change direction because we don't want to admit that something has changed.
Maybe the circumstances changed. Maybe we changed. Maybe what once felt like exactly the right place for us really was exactly the right place for us — then.
And maybe we've simply outgrown the container.
That's where pride can start looking like doubling down, trying harder, finding another strategy, reworking the plan and convincing ourselves that if we can just find the right way to do this, we'll finally feel the way we used to feel inside something that doesn't fit us the same way anymore.
I did a lot of that.
When the chapter I was in stopped clicking the way I thought it should, my first assumption wasn't, Perhaps this isn't where I'm supposed to stay.
It was basically:
Clearly I need a better spreadsheet.
Ok, not literally.
Well... actually, maybe a little bit literally.
If you worked with me during that season, you know. I could turn just about anything into a spreadsheet or PowerPoint. It was practically a personality trait.
But the point is, I kept looking for the adjustment that would make everything click again.
And that's not necessarily a bad instinct. There's something admirable about being willing to work through problems instead of immediately walking away from them.
The problem comes when all that problem-solving keeps us from asking whether we're solving the right problem.
What if the question isn't, How do I make this work?
What if it's, Do I still want this to work?
Yikes.
That's a different conversation.
Because if the answer is no, now we have to deal with everything we've invested.
And we hate wasting things.
Money. Time. Energy. Relationships. Experience.
Nobody wants to look at years of her life and think, Well, apparently that was pointless.
But leaving doesn't make what came before pointless.
That's something I've had to learn in a much deeper way lately.
The chapter I closed taught me things I couldn't have learned from the outside. I worked with women I wouldn't have known otherwise. I learned how people change—and how they don't. I started noticing patterns underneath what people said they were struggling with. I learned things about myself too.
I use those things now. All the time.
The fact that I didn't stay doesn't erase any of it.
That's where I think we get trapped by this idea that the value of an experience is determined by whether it lasted.
It isn't.
Some things do exactly what they were supposed to do in your life and then end. That doesn't make them failures.
Think about how strange it would be if we applied that logic everywhere else.
Well, fourth grade ended. What a waste.
No.
You learned what you needed there and moved on.
Obviously adult life is more complicated than graduating from elementary school, but I think the principle holds. An ending doesn't get to retroactively remove the value from everything that happened before it.
And sometimes admitting that frees us to look at the present more clearly.
Instead of asking, Was this whole thing a mistake?
We can ask, Is it still right now?
That's a much fairer question.
Because the person who made the original decision didn't have everything you know today. She chose with the information, hopes, needs, opportunities and understanding she had then.
And she learned.
That's the whole point, isn't it?
We're supposed to learn. We're supposed to change. We're supposed to become people capable of seeing things we couldn't see before.
It would be pretty weird to spend our entire lives growing and then insist that growth never change any of our decisions.
Faith gives me room for this too.
I've had to rethink the idea that if God used a season, He must have intended me to stay in it indefinitely.
God can use something without making it permanent. He can form us somewhere and then move us. He can redeem time we think we misread, and He can do something meaningful through a path that doesn't end where we thought it would.
That doesn't mean every urge to change direction is divine instruction. Sometimes we're impatient. Sometimes we're avoiding hard things. Sometimes the right thing really is to stay and work through it.
But I've already put so much into this isn't a great reason by itself.
Neither is What will people think if I change my mind?
And neither is But I was so sure.
You were.
You might have been completely right for that season.
You might also have been wrong.
I know. Rude.
But being wrong about something doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It means you made a decision as a human being without access to the next ten chapters.
Welcome to the club.
The better question is what you're going to do with what you know now.
So if you keep trying to make something work because walking away would force you to reconsider what you once believed about it, notice that.
You don't have to trash the old chapter to close it. You don't have to call it a mistake or pretend it never mattered.
Take what it gave you. Be grateful for what was good. Learn from what wasn't.
And let the fact that you grew there be part of the reason you're allowed to grow beyond it.
Want to keep going with this conversation?
🎧 Listen to Episode 55: When You’ve Outgrown Your Life And Don’t Know What Comes Next →