What to Do When Leaving Feels Drastic but Staying Feels Worse
When every option carries weight, and clarity hasn’t arrived yet.
I didn’t wake up knowing I needed to leave.
I woke up knowing I couldn’t keep doing things the same way.
Staying felt heavy. Leaving felt extreme.
I felt trapped between two choices that both scared me.
Feeling torn didn’t mean I was indecisive — it meant neither option felt safe yet.
This was one of the loneliest decision spaces I’ve ever been in.
Why this decision feels uniquely destabilizing
Leaving isn’t just logistical.
It touches identity, stability, finances, and the meaning of home.
Staying, meanwhile, asked my body to keep tolerating something it was already struggling with.
Both choices felt like they carried risk — just different kinds.
When both options feel threatening, the nervous system often freezes instead of choosing.
This tension deepened after I realized family members weren’t experiencing the same symptoms, which complicated my confidence even more, as I wrote about in What to Do When Family Members Aren’t Experiencing the Same Symptoms .
Why I couldn’t decide based on logic alone
I tried lists.
Pros and cons. Timelines. Cost comparisons.
None of it touched the actual conflict.
The decision wasn’t intellectual — it was physiological.
A body under strain can’t be reasoned into safety.
This was the same realization I’d had when I struggled to think clearly about expensive decisions, something I explored in How to Think Clearly Again Before Making Expensive Decisions .
What helped when I couldn’t choose yet
I stopped asking myself to decide.
I asked what reduced strain right now.
Small changes mattered more than final answers.
I didn’t need to know where I was going — I needed to know I wasn’t making things worse.
Reducing harm didn’t require committing to leaving or staying.
This approach grew out of learning how to slow down without ignoring the problem, which I wrote about in How to Slow Down Without Ignoring the Problem .
How the decision clarified over time
Clarity didn’t arrive as certainty.
It arrived as contrast.
I noticed how my body responded to distance — even temporary distance.
The answer showed up in my capacity, not my thoughts.
Decisions became possible once my body experienced relief, not before.
This mirrored what I had already learned about patterns showing up gradually, especially noticing when symptoms improved outside the home, as I described in When Symptoms Improve Outside the Home — What That Usually Means .
FAQ
Does feeling torn mean I should wait?
For me, it meant I needed more information from my body, not more pressure.
Is it okay to leave temporarily?
Temporary distance helped me feel without committing.
What if staying feels unbearable?
That signal mattered.
I learned not to argue with sustained distress.