When I think about untying my lines, I don’t see it as a journey of selfishness. I think about it as an awakening to oneself. As we transition into adulthood, our identities become heavily burdened by other people, social norms, cultural obligations. We believe the stories we are told, and we willingly jump on the adulting treadmill, only to thoroughly exhaust ourselves and realize one day that we’ve actually not gone anywhere.
And then something happens to wake us up from this grind. I call these events a “driving force”. A driving force can be as simple as a comment from a friend that holds a mirror up in front of us. It could be an argument with a partner that you’ve had 100 times before and this time is too many. It could be a book you read that exposes you to yourself. As we wake up to ourselves and begin to see a life before us where we can escape all of the layers that have been applied to us and kept us so blind, we will invariably have to end something – end a relationship, leave a job, move away – all with the goal of living more authentically.
I recently watched the film Women Talking and then went to my journals to read what I wrote as I was trying to decide whether or not to leave my marriage. The film is about a Mennonite community where many of the women were getting drugged and sexually assaulted by a group of cruel attackers in the colony. They identified their attackers and needed to make a decision about what to do next. They were debating their options: Stay and Forgive, Stay and Fight, or Leave. In reading my journals, I can see myself debating very similar options. While these options might appear to be fairly straight forward, the reality is that making a leave or stay decision is agonizing. With each option, there are both compelling benefits and massive sacrifices.
The severity of each situation will certainly vary. For the women in the Mennonite community, the stakes were high. Some situations might be equally urgent, while others might allow for more time to make a decision. For example, my decision to leave my marriage was a process that took me over four years to make. Shortly after leaving my marriage, I left a long-term career for a completely different job. That decision was significantly swifter. But I believe there are some core elements to consider when deciding if it’s time to leave.
Knowing When to Leave
Listen to your body – In reading my journals, I say, “all of my insides have been disrupted…they are strewn about and I’m frantically trying to put them all back inside”. I knew I needed to make a change because I felt it in my body. I couldn’t settle myself, and I felt no ease. I knew that I wasn’t going to feel a sense of peace until a change was made.
I honestly believe that we feel misalignment with our path in our bodies. Our bodies can tell us this in a variety of ways. We can experience anxiety and depression, fatigue, digestive issues, muscle aches and pains, sleeplessness, and a myriad of other issues when we are out of alignment with ourselves.
If your body is routinely sending you messages that you aren’t ok, then it might be time to consider some changes.
Visualize your future – One of the most powerful driving forces for me was a workshop I attended where the facilitator asked us to take a few moments to write down where we visualized ourselves in ten years if we could be anything we wanted. I wrote down that I saw myself traveling, running a thriving business where I am helping people, and spending daily time outdoors.
Staying in my current situation was not going to allow me to achieve anything similar to this vision. While I knew in my gut that I was misaligned with my path, this exercise woke me up to what my vision for the future was and how many things would need to change to get me there. This vision has become a life force for me and has taken on the role of personal motivator.
If the future you envision is far off course of your current path, then it may be time to consider some changes.
Name your fears – Sometimes the biggest thing keeping us stuck in our lives is the fear of change. My fears were big and held me in chains. I didn’t even know what they were, but the fear of doing anything different was so great that I didn’t even try.
Eventually, I felt so encased in fear that I decided to write them all down. I started writing and realized that some of my fears were very legitimate and some of them were more irrational. For each fear, I asked myself to write down what it would take to overcome that fear; I identified the action and that “what if this fear comes true”. Once I stepped back and looked at all of it, it seemed a lot less scary. Making change seemed achievable – the fears seemed overcomeable (I just made up that word). Sometimes the idea of fear is greater that the actual things that scare us.
If your fears seem to be a giant obstacle, but you write them down and they seem overcomeable, then it might be time to make some changes.
Consider your personal agency – “Personal agency refers to an individual’s ability to control their own behaviors and reactions to circumstances beyond their control, even if their actions are limited by someone or something else” – Rebecca Heimel
This one is big for me, and I think for so many of us. As we are thinking about our paths, we often find ourselves stuck because we have lost our personal agency. How much do you feel like you are in control of your life path? Our ability to maneuver and change and grow and transition is one of the things that makes us uniquely human. When we are no longer in touch with our personal agency, it can create a strong sense of misalignment.
If you feel like you are no longer in charge of your personal agency, it might be time to make some changes.
There ae probably many more, but these are the primary ones for me.