Walking Away

There’s a negative connotation with walking away from situations that no longer serve you. In today’s world this has become synonymous with giving up. But is walking away from something and giving up the same? Is there a difference? If there is, what is the difference? This week in Deeper Thoughts let’s walk through walking away.

There’s some nuances between the two. Giving up is more in line with quitting. Let’s take a look at Tim for an example. Tim decides he’s going to get into shape and start jogging every day either before or after work. He tries getting up early for his jog, but hates the loss of sleep. So he opts for going after work, but then gets annoyed that it cuts into his time playing video games. On top of that he hates how winded he feels afterwards as well as how much he sweats and has to take a second shower, which cuts into his game time more. After a few days he starts making excuses to not go then just stops without the excuses. This could be seen as just giving up.

But Julia on the other hand also wants to get into better shape and takes up jogging. She used to play soccer in high school and isn’t a stranger to physical activity. But after a while these jogging sessions start hurting at older injuries in her knees. She tries to push through the pain, but it persists long after her jogs are over. After some thought she decides jogging might not be the best path for her to get into better shape. She eventually looks into swimming laps instead because she still gets a great workout for her and it doesn’t cause the same pains jogging did.

Here’s the difference. Tim quits jogging because it wasn’t a priority for him. He didn’t really want to put in the effort he thought he did and gave up. Julia on the other hand chose to walk away because the pain that resulted from those jogs didn’t serve her, despite wanting to be healthy and instead of giving up even found an alternative for her goal.

These are some simplified examples. But let’s look into something more complex.

Brandon is engaged to Shelby. They’ve been together for 3 years now. Brandon has a tendency to not take ownership of his mistakes and repair ruptures he creates. But this pattern remains consistent. He’s always running late, promising to take Shelby on dates, but always having to cancel plans, stays out later with his friends when they go out drinking, keeps spending money on sports betting instead of paying bills, the list goes on. 

Shelby will call him out on his mistakes and patterns trying to have conversations about these issues, but instead of working to fix those things he’ll deflect, make excuses, gaslight, or make false promises about never doing what he did wrong again. Over time he feels he’s in a nagging relationship and nothing he ever does is right and gets resentful towards Shelby even though it’s his patterns that are causing issues in the relationship. So finally he has enough and ends the engagement. It is easier for him to end the relationship instead of making repairs to those ruptures he’s caused and work on bettering himself. This would be an example of giving up.

But let’s switch things up in this scenario. Let’s look at this relationship from Shelby’s perspective. Brandon has the same patterns as described above. He runs late, promises to take her out on dates, cancels those plans, stays out late and keeps wasting money they need for rent and bills. She keeps trying to talk to him about these things, but he always deflects from the issues, makes excuses, and tries to gaslight her. On the rare occasion he says he’ll do better, he never does and after a short while goes back to doing the things causing ruptures in the relationship. And with all of these repeated attempts on her part to have conversations to try and repair these ruptures he tells her she’s always nagging at him over “nothing.”

After over a year of this Shelby weighs her options. After several weeks of deep thought on the matter she decides that this relationship isn’t good for her. It causes her more stress than anything and she realizes she can’t trust Brandon to follow through on his promises. So she ultimately decides to leave and walk away from the relationship. She gave her best effort for the relationship, but was not met with the same energy by Brandon.

Giving up is when you stop doing something because you don’t want to because it’s “too hard.” It’s the easy route. When you walk away from something that isn’t serving you, you’ve tried all you could to make it work. Giving up is easy, but walking away from something takes a special kind of strength. It’s harder to do because you’ve put in so much effort to try and make something work or you might even be scared of what’s next because of all the unknowns that can lie ahead.

This is why walking away from relationships can be difficult, be it friendships, romantic, or family, no matter how toxic they can be where so much energy has been poured into that relationship hoping it will get better.

And it’s not just relationships either. You can run a business for 20 years but when it’s been struggling for the last 5 years or so it can be difficult to make the decision to close down the doors for good. Walking away from what you love and have poured vast amounts of energy into is painful and not something many people can do easily, if at all. It takes strength to know when it’s time to end things because they have become a detriment to you, be it financially, mentally, physically, emotionally or a combination of those things.

Give it your best shot, but when things aren’t working out know when it’s in your best interest to walk away from a situation. If you’ve done all you can and there’s nothing left, then that may very well be your best option.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you all have an enlightening day.