I Can’t Stay Here Anymore: The Beginning

The realisation that staying where you are, who you are, or keeping up with what you’ve built is no longer possible.

The Sentence That Ends And Starts It All

There comes a time when the weight of staying where you are, who you are, and what you came to be becomes unbearable. You may not say it out loud or shout it at anyone, not at first. You may swallow it for months or years or even decades. But eventually that sentence arrives, and it is sharp and undeniable:

I can’t stay here anymore!

Sometimes it jumps out in a single moment, like a blade you did not plan on using cutting through fog. But often it builds slowly, ache by ache, until one day you realise you have already crossed the point of no return.

I know this moment well. I have lived it more than once. For me it has been a sentence heavy with sadness and remorse, because I understood leaving always implied a multifaceted loss. That sentence has been the start of painful inner conversations between grief and celebration.

Those conversations exposed guilt for the present state of my life which I had not managed to properly plan for nor actually control the way I thought I was. They revealed my fears of future mistakes, because if I messed up this bad how the heck was I going to get it right moving ahead. But mostly, they stirred (and still do) anger; anger at myself and at those I blamed.

And as the strong and intentional person I thought I was those words — I can’t stay here anymore — made me doubt. Because when those emotions take over it is almost impossible to see clearly what the path ahead looks like.

One thing is for certain:
things, my life, needs to change, and deserves to change.
I can’t stay here anymore!

Within that realisation there is also hope, and a fair amount of faith. Faith that life can be not only different but better. More meaningful, and significantly more aligned. A sense that whatever is next, even if uncertain, will be closer to the truth than the life that has been endured up to now.

So you will find sadness here in this blog, because endings always wound. You will find hope, because every ending carries the seed of many potential beginnings. You will also find questions that have no quick answers.

And I think you will discover as I have that many of the answers you seek can only come through action, through stepping forward when everything in you wants to cling back to “safety”.

This blog will not move in a straight line. It will travel through restlessness and fear, through anger and boredom, through loyalty and guilt and the wilderness of the unknown, and through the difficulty of leaving with integrity.

I will then share my own inner work of becoming more, of my scars turning into stories, and of ruins and burned bridges emerging as raw material for a more meaningful future.

I hope to inspire you to declare the life you will stand behind, the one that will require you to cross that threshold for good if it is indeed what needs to be done.

My master plan for sharing I Can’t Stay Here Anymore here, in pieces, is to offer you companionship through that threshold. To give you some of the support I so wished someone would have given me in those dark yet somewhat “safe” days.

If you are reading this, I take it you are already standing at the edge or very near it.

And yes, edges are dangerous. But we both know that they are also the only place where one learns to fly.

Raphan