For a long time, I believed leaving meant failure.
Not because anyone said it directly, but because staying was always framed as strength. Endurance was praised. Loyalty was rewarded, at least in theory. Walking away was treated as something you did when you could not cope.
So I learned to push through discomfort. To tolerate what did not sit right. To tell myself that commitment meant staying longer than felt healthy.
It took time to realise how much that belief was costing me.
There came a point when the question was no longer whether I could continue. Of course I could. I had been continuing for years. The real question was whether staying would require me to abandon parts of myself I could not get back.
That is a quieter reckoning.
I remember noticing how my internal dialogue had changed. I no longer asked what I needed to do next. I asked how much more I could absorb. I measured my days by what I could endure rather than what felt aligned.
That is when I knew something fundamental had shifted.
Leaving did not arrive as a dramatic decision. It arrived as clarity. A slow, steady knowing that staying would mean participating in something that no longer matched my values. That continuing would require silence where honesty mattered.
I realised that the cost of leaving was no longer the highest cost available to me.
What surprised me most was how calm the decision felt once it was made. There was grief, yes. And sadness for what I had hoped might change. But there was also relief. A sense of internal alignment I had not felt in a long time.
That was when I understood that self-respect does not always announce itself loudly.
Sometimes it arrives quietly, as the refusal to keep betraying yourself.
Leaving with integrity means resisting the urge to justify yourself endlessly. It means allowing others to misunderstand if understanding requires you to distort the truth. It means accepting that not everyone will agree with your choice and making it anyway.
This was not about escape. It was about authorship.
I was no longer willing to let my sense of worth be negotiated by systems that benefited from my silence. I was no longer willing to trade clarity for acceptance.
What I know now is this.
Staying is not always strength. And leaving is not always loss.
Sometimes leaving is the moment you stop outsourcing yourself respect.
If you are standing at the edge of a decision like this, feeling the weight of what you are about to release, I want you to hear something gently.
You are not giving up.
You are choosing to live in alignment with yourself.
And that is not weakness.
It is integrity in motion.
Copyright © 2026 Lynette Diehm.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced without written permission of the author.
