Stay or Leave by The School Of Life

Author:The School Of Life
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The School of Life

13. WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME TO MAKE ME LESS SCARED OF LEAVING?

Let us imagine, for the sake of the argument, that you want to leave; it’s just that you’re scared of doing so. What might you need to hear to lessen the fear? A list might look like this:

1. You are, to a far greater extent than you perhaps realise, already alone. To be formally alone would merely mean concretising something that has been your reality for a long time anyway and, paradoxically, would be the first step towards helping you to bring the isolation and agonising frustration to a deserved close.

2. The emotional loneliness you currently feel cannot end until you bring yourself to endure a period of practical loneliness, which is, as you know (but are terrified of knowing), the lesser of the two evils. The awkwardness of dinner by yourself is nothing compared to the challenge of feeling repeatedly misunderstood by a central person in your life. Someone who stubbornly doesn’t get it is a greater rebuke to who you are than an empty chair.

3. You are spending a lot of energy defending yourself against legitimate hope by leaning unfairly on some undoubted general truths: that all lovers are flawed and that all honeymoon periods end. To tease out the limits of this reassuring but ultimately self-deluding exaggeration, change ‘lovers’ to ‘movies’ or ‘holiday destinations’. It is as factually correct to insist that there are no perfect lovers as to point out that there are no perfect films or resorts. But this is no argument for refusing ever to change TV channels or for denying that there might be an appreciable difference between a holiday in Milton Keynes or in Lake Como. There is such a thing as ‘better’ and ‘worse’ for you; this truth is no less correct for being difficult to contemplate.

4. It is worse to be ostensibly together while privately disconnected than to be properly, publicly, firmly by yourself, just as it is better to be allowed to cry than to be forced to smile while burning inside.

5. What is really holding us back is that we don’t trust ourselves very much; we feel undeserving and ashamed of ourselves (this has, as we have started to see, a lot to do with childhood). Our inability to leave is often a symptom of self-hatred. If we were firmly on our own side, it would be more evident that we might deserve and could lay claim to something more sustaining.

6. Complete the following sentence: ‘If all the practical hurdles could be taken care of as if by magic (the agony of telling them, the difficulty of finding a new place, the embarrassment of breaking the news to mutual friends, etc.), what I would really like to happen next is….’ Ignoring your reply means sacrificing yet more of your life on the altar of a tricky chat with certain acquaintances who don’t care anyway, or of a boring afternoon or two with an estate agent. Your most precious commodity is time.

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