You Must Leave When You Must
A lot of things might not get that bad if you leave a place, a person or a thing on time.
I want to begin this piece by asking you how long do you chew a chewing gum? The thing with chewing gums is that you just want to throw them out of your mouth the moment it goes tasteless, you just cannot stand its presence in your mouth when it loses its flavor. Why do you not apply this to other aspects of your life?
Every time I have taken a life changing decision in my life, my biggest question to myself has always been why did it take so long for me to take it? More than facing the repercussions of it, analyzing the pros and cons of the decision, the one thing staring at me in my eyes when I look at myself in the mirror is what took me so long to take a decision that I knew was the best thing for me to do?
We tend to procrastinate tasks in life, including the important decisions. While delays in some of the tasks don’t cost us that much, some other delays might cause a lot of harm. I have a friend who finally broke up with the most toxic guy I have ever known after six years of wasting time on him. In a study it was found that a woman returns seven times to her husband before finally leaving him in cases of domestic violence. A friend of mine had a terrible job that seemed to take the life out of her- the pay was low, she was not getting any hikes, she knew she was capable of far more than what she got from that job and she did not enjoy a minute of her time she spent working for it. Still, it took her more than three years to quit. The thing about being involved in things that you should not be involved in at all is that it drains the life out of you. When you prolong leaving a person with whom you don’t belong, or a place where you don’t belong, or a thing that makes you uncomfortable, you feel your enthusiasm for life waning out of you with each passing day. You feel stuck in a way that is very difficult to be described in words.
Why is it that we prolong taking such decisions? One of the major reasons is that we don’t want to step out of our comfort zones, even if the comfort zone is bad. We don’t want to lose the false sense of security we feel in maintaining the status quo. Taking a life-changing decision requires us to step out of that delusional security, something that we are not willing to do. Another thing about doing something remarkable is that we feel guilty when we change. A lot of times when we want to leave a place or person, the norms of society are against us. The society dictates a strict pattern to be followed in our lives- when to get good marks, when to get into a college, then again get good marks, when to get a high paying job, when to get married, when to have kids, how to raise them, how to be the ideal wife or husband or parents or child or sibling and the list never ends. When you step out of this line, and try to do something different, you find yourself alone against a large set of people and their ideas of society, and it can get a lot more scary than it seems. This explains why you keep delaying breaking up from a long-term relationship or resigning from a job that is slowly killing you from the inside.
What we forget is that the losses we imagine upon leaving a place or person where we do not belong to, are nothing in comparison to the incomprehensible losses that happen when we choose toxicity. When we make toxicity a part of our lives, we lose self-esteem. We begin to feel that we deserve the bad that is happening to us or with us. We start believing that we deserve this unhappiness and with time start forgetting that there are ways possible to get out of this pit-hole. We accept our fate forgetting that fate can be changed by actions and the right mindset. All this needs to be changed. Change is always uncomfortable. Yet, and in fact that is why we must do it. You need to leave toxic people, jobs and places to realize how good life can be. It is high time that you leave things that do not make you feel good about yourself.
You keep telling yourself that you deserve the unhappiness life is throwing at you right now, but maybe its time that you change what you deserve.
You may reach out to me at sdshivanidubey@gmail.com.
