“If something isn’t right for you, he’ll let you know. Not in a big announcement, but in a thousand little nudges.” ~Martha Beck
One morning I was sitting at the kitchen table with my coffee, when a thought that I had not allowed myself to think of before crossed my mind: This can’t be the rest of my life.
There wasn’t a single dramatic moment that I could point to and say,This that’s why I have to go.”
Part of me wished there was some obvious, clear-cut betrayal or breaking point that I could point to and say,There. This is the reason.” Then I wouldn’t have had to rely on my inner experience alone. My husband didn’t cheat on me and I wasn’t mistreated. From the outside, my life seemed stable, respectable, even successful. I built it on loyalty, commitment, and doing things the “right” way.
I got married at nineteen and became deeply involved in my church, even mentoring newlyweds. On paper, I was living the life I should have aspired to.
But something changed in me. At first it showed as a quiet exhaustion, not the kind that sleep fixes, but the kind that comes from forcing yourself to live a life that no longer suits you. I woke up tired and went to bed tired, and even on days when there was nothing special, everything felt heavy.
I felt like I was moving through life instead of living it.
The thought that doesn’t go away
This thought kept coming back: This can’t be the rest of my life.
He appeared in quiet moments, folding laundry, driving to the store, standing in the shower. Nothing dramatic happened, but I kept feeling the same realization: something in my life doesn’t fit anymore.
Every time it surfaced, I pushed it down, reminding myself to be grateful and listing all the reasons why my life is good. But it didn’t pass. It became harder to drown.
So I did what I knew how to do. I tried to figure it out.
I read self-help books, listened to podcasts, and asked my friends what they would do if they were me. Most people said some variation of the same thing: If you’re not happy, leave. But even though they said it, I knew I wouldn’t. Because I was scared of what it meant.
I kept telling myself it wasn’t bad enough to leave and that was the problem. If something had been obviously wrong, I think I would have trusted myself more quickly. But when your life looks good on the outside, it’s easy to talk yourself out of what you’re feeling on the inside. You tell yourself you’re lucky. You tell yourself that others have it worse. Telling yourself you want something else means there’s something wrong with you.
Since I didn’t have a clear reason for wanting something else, I kept asking myself: “Why can’t I just be happy? Why can’t I be grateful for what I have?”
I didn’t ask because I didn’t know. I asked because I didn’t want the answer to be what I already knew. I wanted someone to give me permission to keep things the way they were – tell me it’s just a phase and I’ll get over it.
Somewhere along the way, I senselessly felt as if I had opened something that I could not close. I tried putting the cover back on. I tried to go back to things. But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t know what I knew. The life I built fit who I was, but I wasn’t that person anymore.
If that’s true… then what?
This realization made things clearer and much scarier. Because if I wasn’t that person, then who was I?
Fully admitting how I felt meant that everything could change, not just my marriage, but how I felt. I built my life around loyalty, commitment and confidence. So I kept circling because I didn’t know what was going to happen, it was easier to admit what was already true. I didn’t know who I would be if I wasn’t that person.
For someone who had always been aware of who I was and what I was working towards, not knowing it felt like losing the ground beneath me.
I tried to think about certainty for a while before doing anything. But eventually I got tired of waiting to be sure. I was ready to do something about what I already knew.
I asked a coworker about a therapist she mentioned, called her, and showed up for the appointment. No one looking at my life would have seen that phone call as a turning point, but I did. It was the first time I acted like what I felt mattered.
I didn’t just sit with the thought anymore. I reacted to it.
In the first therapy session, I realized how disconnected I was from my own feelings. Years of exhaustion and exhaustion weren’t just stress. These were signs of how long I had repressed my own experiences. I felt normal for so long that I didn’t know there was another way to live.
As I continued to work with my therapist, I began to notice how difficult it was to answer simple questions about how I was feeling.
In one of the sessions I told him that I was leaving home when I was nineteen because my father was an alcoholic and it wasn’t safe for me to stay here. I couldn’t afford to pay the bills on my own, and in the Bible Belt culture I grew up in, marriage felt like the only real option.
He asked what the experience was like for me and I said something like:Just do what you have to do.” She replied, “But what was that like for you? What was your experience of feeling like you didn’t have a good choice?”
I started reaching for words like ‘unfair’ and ‘impossible’. Then he asked: “Did that make you angry?” I burst into tears. I was angry, angrier than I had ever let myself be. Angry that I didn’t feel supported. Angry at the rules I grew up with and felt I had no choice. I’m angry at myself for giving up my power and staying in a situation that didn’t support me for over a decade.
And I never recognized it or allowed myself to feel it. It’s no wonder I’ve worked so hard to keep busy, be grateful, and keep going. A part of me tried to protect him all along.
But once I started being honest about what I was feeling, something changed. I found my voice. I heard my own intuition again. I stopped living life on autopilot and started making decisions with more intention.
A few years after that first phone call, my outer life looked completely different. I divorced my husband and we remained good friends. I left my corporate job and started a freelance business that I had wanted to do for years. I also found the love of my life.
And it all started with a thought that I tried so hard to push away: This can’t be the rest of my life. At the time, I thought this thought was a problem, evidence that something was wrong with me. What I understand now is that this was the beginning of me finally listening to myself.
What I understand now
Looking back, I understand something I couldn’t see at the time: the worst lives aren’t always the ones that are hardest to leave. Sometimes they are often the ones who are fine who don’t give you a clear reason to go.
So when something inside of you starts asking for something else, it’s easy to call it selfish, dramatic, or ungrateful. But that voice isn’t always asking you to blow up your life. Sometimes it’s just asking you to admit that something isn’t right anymore. Change often begins this way, not with a dramatic decision, but with the moment you stop pretending you don’t know.
About Patti Bryant
Patti Bryant is an author and coach for women who feel that something is not quite right in their lives, even if they can’t explain why. More information: pattibryant.com.
