Three Times I Walked Away

On leaving what looks like a life to build one that’s actually yours

I think people assume I’ve always been this untethered woman — writing, coaching, living a life that looks like it was never bolted down to anything. That isn’t the whole story. I was married for half my life. I spent years climbing a corporate ladder I never asked myself whether I wanted to be on.

I walked away. Three times.

The first time was a divorce.

That might not sound like much. Plenty of women divorce and come out better for it. I did too. But at fifty-five, I had never once lived alone. Not for a summer or a season. I had never not been someone’s something — someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s mother. Underneath all of the furnishings, there was a woman with her own preferences, her own hungers, and I had lost track of where she was.

Nobody warns you that freedom and grief can share a body. There was no one to split the rent with, no one to talk to at the end of the day, no one left to blame when something broke. You’d think the introvert in me would have been drunk on the solitude. I loved it and it terrified me in the same breath, because for the first time there was no one’s approval standing between me and my own life. I had to build that approval myself, out of nothing, in an empty house.

So, I did. I bought a home. I went back to school. I traveled more in the following dozen years than I had in the first fifty-five. I turned that house into a sanctuary — a place to get honest with myself, to see the end of my marriage as a gift instead of a verdict, and to start asking who I actually wanted to become, now that there was no one left to ask permission from.

A few years later, I left again.

This time it was a career I’d spent more than two decades building, and the paycheck and benefits that came with it. What my divorce had cracked open in me made it impossible not to see how soul-starving that corporate world had become. I left without a net, without a plan, without anyone’s blessing. I only knew I couldn’t stay in that energy another day and call it a life. Within six months I was training to be a life coach. I never looked back, and I never asked anyone if it was a wise idea first.

Seven years after that, I left again.

This time I walked away from the sanctuary itself — the home I’d built as proof I could stand on my own. I know how that sounds in a world where so many people are locked out of owning anything at all. I don’t discount homeownership for the people who want it. I simply stopped wanting to maintain a house. I sold it, bought an RV, and wandered for a while. When I wasn’t moving, I stayed with family or friends. I don’t have the RV anymore. For now, I rent.

What I long for today is a plot of ground where I can garden — vegetables, flowers, sourdough rising on the counter, enough to feed my neighbors and friends and whoever else shows up hungry. That’s where my heart has landed. Will it happen? Maybe. It won’t happen if I don’t let myself want it out loud.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll be impressed by how many times I’ve started over. I’m telling you because somewhere in you there may be a walking-away that hasn’t happened yet — a life that looks perfectly furnished from the outside and feels like a room you’re not allowed to rearrange from the inside.

Here’s what I notice, looking back at all three thresholds: every single time, I was waiting for something outside myself to say it was allowed. A marriage to end formally. A paycheck to stop mattering. A house to stop feeling like proof of anything. What actually moved me wasn’t permission arriving from somewhere else — it was the moment I stopped waiting for it. Self-approval isn’t a feeling that shows up and makes leaving easy. It’s the thing you practice building in the exact moment when no one is available to tell you you’re doing it right.

Ken Page once wrote that our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts. The thing we’re most trying to hide, or hide from, is often the very gift we came here to hand over to somebody else. Every gift I’ve ever had to offer was on the other side of a walking-away I had to approve of myself, because no one else was going to hand me the permission first.

If any of this landed — if there’s a walking-away of your own you’ve been circling — that’s the terrain the one-on-one work is for. Not someone handing you a map, but someone who has actually crossed thresholds like this one and can tell you honestly what the footing feels like underneath.

If you want to talk it through before deciding anything, a $27 Clarity Session gives us space to look at exactly where you are.

And if this isn’t the moment for that, it’s all right. Sometimes simply knowing someone else walked this strange path and lived it is enough. With love,

P.S. Every one-on-one client starts with a Clarity Session — it’s not a sales call, it’s the first step, so we can both find out if this is the right fit before going any further.