I know I’ve been quiet the last few months. Life has been….a lot.

It’s been my own personal Year of Hell [any ST Voyager fans on here to understand that reference?]

As autumn is taking hold of central PA, I’ve found myself standing in the rubble of more than one thing I thought would last forever.

At the beginning of this summer, my ten-year relationship came to an end. A decade of shared moments, private jokes, and raising kids—unraveled. Around the same time, I’ve watched a community organization I love with my whole heart teeter on the brink. I look at it and honestly don’t know if it’s going to survive, or if all the collective will in the world can keep its lights on. I’m not in remission anymore, for the first time in a decade. Watching my body deteriorate and change yet again, teeth crumbling from the meds, hair falling out, needing naps nearly every day – it’s a lot.

More than once, I’ve found myself pacing the floor at two in the morning, turning the same impossible question over and over in my mind. How do you know when you’re supposed to keep fighting, and how do you know when it’s time to walk away?

I’m not writing this blog post because I’ve come to any profound or tidy answers. I’m writing because I’m right in the thick of the wrestling, and I’m trying to be better about speaking from a place of vulnerability. And frankly, writing helps me sort through my wandering and restless thoughts.

And what I’ve been thinking about lately, what has taken up so much free real estate in my own mind, are some lyrics from a Carrie Newcomer song [big surprise, NOT] and a passage from the Christian bible [definitely a little more surprising].

Carrie’s song “A Book of Questions” has a few lyrics that have been swirling around in my mind – “Are there stories that just had to end? Did you finally learn what kept coming around again? Ever love a place that you still had to leave?” And the Bible passage? “To everything there is a season…”

Because of course those would be the questions and statements….that’s where my stubborn brain and conflicted heart are living right now – and I know I’m not the only one feeling like this.

Those of us with big hearts and stubborn spirits tend to believe that sufficient devotion can resurrect anything. If we just care enough, organize better, love harder, communicate more clearly, or sacrifice another piece of our weekend, the relationship will mend. The institution will stabilize.

We convince ourselves that walking away is synonymous with giving up—that if something fails on our watch, it is an indictment of our endurance or devotion.

It isn’t.

The brutal reality I’m struggling with accepting right now is that I can’t love, manage, or willpower something into being viable when the foundation itself is toxic or broken. One of the clearest diagnostics of this that I’ve had to ask myself on several levels—painful as it is to think about—is to ask: What happens if I stop holding the walls up?

If I were to step back for a week, a month, or even a few days, does the structure stay standing? Does the other person/someone else step into the vacuum? Does the community rally to shoulder the weight?

The kick in the guts is that if the answer is no—if the entire program/relationship/community instantly threatens to collapse the second you stop exhausting yourself—you aren’t nurturing something alive. You are keeping a ghost on life support. There is a huge difference between fighting alongside someone to bridge a chasm, and lying down across the gap so they can walk across you. One is partnership. The other is self-erasure.

The self-erasure thing is a really hard pill for me to swallow. That’s the part that has hit me like a ton of bricks over and over this year. It’s so hard not to do it, and looking honestly at WHY I tend to do this is even more difficult. But figuring out if you’re fighting for something in a healthy way versus doing this self-erasure thing is a huge part of discerning whether it’s a healthy fight …or not.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t fight for what we care about. Struggle is baked into the human condition. Love gets messy, and that’s okay. Community work is grueling, unglamorous, and slow most of the time. True communitcation requires a little sweat, some sacrifice, and the willingness to stay at the table for the hard comversations, even when there’s friction between people.

The distinction lies in whether the friction is productive or erosive.

In a productive struggle, the friction produces traction. You can look back over months of difficulty and see traces of forward movement, even if it’s measured in fractions of an inch. You might be bone-tired, but your character remains whole. You recognize yourself in the mirror. You still like the person you are becoming within the fight.

Erosion is the opposite. It doesn’t build on itself. It doesn’t move forward. It wears you smooth in a bad way until you have no edges left. It asks you to make quiet ethical compromises, to swallow legitimate grievances, to live in chronic resentment, and to shrink your expectations until they fit into a mold that doesn’t quite feel right. When staying requires us to become cynical, resentful, or spiritually hollow, the battle’s already been lost. When we get to this point, we aren’t saving the thing anymore. Instead it is slowly consuming us from the soul out. And that’s when it’s time to start thinking about walking away.

The hardest part of walking away—whether it’s walking away from a person you’ve spent a decade loving, or walking away from a mission that once set your spirit on fire—is grieving the potential.

We rarely stay in a situation because of the way things are in the present moment. We generally choose to stay because of what we think/wish/know they could be. We remember the magic of year three. We remember the room full of passionate people at that first town hall. We see the blueprint of the beautiful thing clearly in our mind’s eye, and we cannot bear the thought of abandoning that memory or potential.

Learning to leave means learning to mourn a possibility without demanding that reality conform to it. It means looking at the person in front of you—or the organization in front of you—and having the humility to say: I see who you are right now, not who I wish you were. And who you are right now can’t meet me where I need to be met.

Fuck.

Writing that last paragraph just made me realize that I might be closer to a decision about something than I thought I was. And I don’t particularly like the way I’m leaning.

I think the decision point lies in figuring out if you’re at the place where the fight simply drains out of you, and it’s not replaced by bitterness or numbness, but rather by a sad, sober acceptance. I think it comes at the point where you realize that endurance isn’t really the ‘right’ or ‘virtuous’ choice if it only buys us more time inside an impossible reality.

Letting go of a decade-long relationship breaks your heart.

Watching a community you gave your blood to struggle for air breaks your spirit.

But walking away from what cannot be saved is not an act of cowardice. It is an act of radical stewardship. It is the moment when you decide that your life, your energy, and your capacity to give are also worthy and finite resources—and that they deserve to be poured into soil that is actually willing to grow something back.

So the question becomes “do I stay and fight like hell, or do I go – grateful for what was and grieving what is and could have been?”

And that’s what I’m still trying to figure out.