The courage to quit

A relationship is not a failure just because it ends.

A True Life Built is a living photo essay on starting over and building a truer life. It’s for anyone, at any age, who is finding the courage to begin again. Subscribe for free weekly posts.

My niece watching the birds from my parents’ porch. December 2022.

Whenever I visit my parents, I start my day with the birds. I drink coffee on their screened porch in the small-town South and enjoy the flutter at the feeder. Last Christmas, the birdbath was a solid orb of ice and the birds were busy, chattering in the pines. I watched the winter visitors—tiny yellow pine warblers, bluebirds with their twilight tails—and thought back to an earlier version of this same scene.

There were different birds then and I sat alone on the other side of the screen. It was March of 2020. I had taken the last plane out of Nairobi—touching nothing, barely breathing—before Covid closed the Kenyan borders. Thirty-six surreal hours later, I sat in a stunned quarantine in my parents’ backyard, wondering how I got there.

I had booked a ticket home on sudden impulse, driven by animal instinct for safety. I told my Nairobi-based job that I’d be back in a few weeks. I told my husband that this trip home was temporary. I told myself that a brief break might ease the constant conflict in our marriage. I could not yet accept what my bones knew: that a great storm was rising, and our fragile foundation would not hold.

Weeks turned to months, the pines rained yellow pollen, the birds grew fat. The borders stayed closed. Each week, my husband and I logged onto our couples’ therapy session from opposite sides of the world and tried to find our way back together, the long-distance line taut with pain. Each week, I hung up feeling battered. We were unraveling, and I felt powerless to stop it.

But I couldn’t just quit. I had made a vow—in sickness and in health—and I was a person who finished what she started. Quitting would be a failure, an admission of a colossal mistake in my own judgment. I was successful academically, professionally, financially; how could I have gone so very wrong in love? There had to be—had to be!—a way to make my marriage work.

Then, on a warm day in May of 2020, our couples’ therapy ended suddenly and my last thread of hope snapped. I knew we did not have it in us to begin again. In a daze, I walked for hours through the pines, sick with shame. There was no one to call, for I had confided in no one, afraid of being blamed for giving up. If I had failed so utterly in marriage, I must be irredeemably flawed.

I walked until I reached the Neuse river. Lonely and lost, I opened the podcast

Terrible, Thanks for Asking

and chose an episode on quitting. The guest,

Laura McKowen

was discussing drinking but what struck me was her talk of shame. Like me, she had a big job, ran marathons, did yoga. Like me, she blamed herself and that kept her stuck: “My drinking was my fault. I was doing it wrong. I should be able to drink normally. I should be able to manage it. I should be able to fix it.”

But she couldn’t fix it, any more than I could fix my marriage. The stubborn striving to fix it kept me miserably stuck, hurling myself over and over at the same brick wall. Then Laura said something that drew me up short:

When it comes to the behaviors and the things that may be pulling us down—relationships, habits, where we live, what we’re doing for work—the normal question we ask is:
“Is this bad enough that I have to change?”
But the question we should be asking is “Is this good enough to stay the same?”

Startled, I sat by the river and replayed the question: “Is this good enough to stay the same?” My answer was instantaneous, visceral: No, my marriage was not good enough to stay the same, not by a long shot. So then why was I twisting myself in knots to keep it going? What if I could stop straining to hold something broken together?

For once, I asked myself not just what I could endure but what I wanted. I sat motionless for endless moments, watching the swallows wheel and dive over the water. Then I picked up my phone and googled “divorce” for the first time.

Neuse River, December 2022.

It was in those dark days in 2020 that I first answered my own question: What do I want? I sat on my parents’ screened porch and jotted down my earliest answer in my journal. Last week at Christmas, I sat on the same porch and re-read my old words. I was struck by how true they still ring two and a half years later. Here’s what I wrote:

I want calm and I want peace. I want interactions that fill me up and make me feel seen. I want to have coffee at sunrise in a garden, no matter what garden that is. I want meaning and connection. I want creativity and quiet time to reflect. I want a home that feels like mine. I want to just be without constantly being knocked off balance. I want to work towards a hopeful future instead of battling with a stubborn past.

I want to be well. I want to be free.          

Even in the tormented early days of deciding to divorce, I knew clearly what I wanted, I just needed to find the courage to claim it. Slowly I began to call my friends, to share my growing certainty that I wanted something different. One after the other, they said: “It’s not selfish to withdraw from this struggle, to protect your own peace. We will not judge you, will not leave you.” It was what I needed to hear. Shame poisons in secret, and empathy was the antidote.

Little by little, I withdrew my energy from my troubled marriage and re-invested it in my own life. I rebuilt my garden and a home that feels like mine. I made new friends and quit drinking and began to create. When my divorce was final, on what would have been my fourteenth wedding anniversary, I started sharing my personal writing for the first time.

With each small step towards a truer life, I shed some of the shame. I now see quitting as an active choice, a liberating choice. Quitting was not a failure—I was not a failure—but an ending. A marriage is not good just because it endures, and a relationship is not a failure just because it ends. I did the best I could until I couldn’t anymore, then found the courage to take a different path—and that has made all the difference.

Watching the birds on my parents’ porch. December 2022.

One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!

Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.