We confused walking away with growing up. They are not the same thing.
You’ve said it. Or you’ve heard someone say it. “I’m just choosing myself.” And in that moment, it felt right. It felt powerful. It felt like something you’d been waiting to say for a long time.
And maybe it was exactly right. Maybe you needed to walk away. Maybe that relationship, that situation, that dynamic, it genuinely wasn’t okay. Maybe you stayed longer than you should have and choosing yourself was the healthiest decision you ever made.
But.
There’s a version of that same sentence that comes from a completely different place. From exhaustion, from fear, from not wanting to deal with something hard. And we dress it up in the same words. I’m choosing myself. Because it sounds better than I don’t want to work on this relationship. It sounds better than I’m scared of what I might have to change if I stay.
“We learned to say “I’m choosing myself” so fluently that we stopped asking whether we actually were.”
Think about how relationships end today. The ones where someone just slowly stops showing up, goes cold over WhatsApp, pulls back without explanation, starts saying I need space until the space becomes permanent, no conversation. Just distance, and then silence, and then gone. And when someone asks what happened, the answer is always some version of: it wasn’t healthy for me. I chose myself.
A 2022 survey found that 87 percent of Gen Z in India struggle with relationship problems, with 1 in 3 saying their mental well-being is greatly impacted by breakups. And yet the same generation has been described by therapists as fairly quick to move on and find someone new. Both things are true at once. The leaving hurts and the leaving still happens. Fast. Without the conversation that might have changed everything.
Not did you have the right to leave. You always have that right. The question is did you try? Did you say the thing that needed to be said before you went silent? Did you give the relationship and the other person the honest conversation it deserved?
“An exit is not growth. The conversation you had before the exit, that’s growth.’”
Divorce rates in Indian metro cities have risen by 30 to 40 percent in the last decade and while some of that reflects genuine progress, women finally leaving situations that were never safe for them, some of it reflects something else entirely. It reflects a generation that was never taught how to fight well, how to stay in a hard conversation, how to repair something instead of replacing it. We were given the freedom to leave. Nobody taught us how to try.
Think about your own life for a second. Think about a relationship, romantic, friendship, family that ended not with a big fight but with a slow fade. Ask yourself honestly: was there a conversation that never happened? A thing you felt but never said? A moment where, if you’d just been brave enough to say this is what’s actually hurting me — the whole story might have turned out differently?
Most of us know the answer. And most of us also know that the conversation felt scarier than the leaving.
“You can be completely within your rights and still be the reason someone’s hurting. Both things can be true at the same time.”
And yes, sometimes you say the true thing, and it still doesn’t work. Sometimes you try, and the relationship still ends. That is also real. That is also valid. But that kind of leaving that comes after honest effort, after genuine conversation, after real attempts at repair that is independence. That is a decision made from awareness.
The other kind? The leaving that skips all of that because the conversation felt too hard? That is not independence. That is the easier path. And the problem isn’t just that you took it. The problem is the person left on the other side of it, who never found out why, who is still trying to make sense of a silence they never got to respond to.
“The bravest thing in a relationship is not leaving. It is saying the hard thing and staying to see what happens next.”
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