this is a memoir excerpt for my paid subscription loves. this lil essay will sit in part 2 of the book — leaving (an apt and unsurprising section title amiright). i wrote this when i was processing leaving, and how little it gets spoken about. i’m posting it because it’s still true, and it’s such a huge part of why i want to talk about it. ya feel?
No, really. No one talks about leaving. Maybe it’s taboo. Maybe it’s because people are afraid that if they talk about it, it’ll happen more. We don’t talk about leaving church because we’re scared people will actually leave church. We don’t talk about leaving marriages or long-term relationships because we’re scared that people will start to leave them more often. And, because we don’t talk about it, no one ever knows how to navigate it. It becomes taboo, dirty, something to fear. People don’t know how to navigate when our friends and family members leave. Leaders in churches don’t know how to navigate conversations and relationships when people they have been leading, leave. Individuals don’t know how to navigate leaving because they’ve never had a healthy relationship with leaving, they've never known how to leave. It’s always been a fearful, avoided topic. It’s always been something to steer clear of. It’s always been a topic of shame.
Our culture has equated leaving with failure, and therefore: leaving with shame.
I never knew what leaving meant, how it would feel, what it would look like — I never knew all the nuanced ways it would effect me. I never knew how it would hurt. I never learned that the hurt would come in cycles, in stages. I never knew the ways it would heal me, that I would heal from leaving. Not learning about leaving meant I didn’t know when leaving was safe, when leaving was good. Not talking about leaving, meant I stayed in places too long, despite unhealthy relationships and disconnection with myself. I stayed because all I knew about leaving, was that we shouldn't talk about it, and we definitely shouldn’t do it.