How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away

by Emily P. Freeman

clichés are, by definition, phrases that are overused and taken so far away from their intended context that they lose all meaning and impact. Our work, then, is to put these experiences back into context, to fill in the missing parts and the general pieces with nuance, specificity, and humanity. A life experience cannot be cliché.

What’s not working here? It’s possible to rush out of a room too soon or stay way too long simply because we’ve misidentified the color of a flag. This is a point-and-call practice, which means you’re noticing but not diagnosing. I’ve found it helpful to just assume every flag is yellow at first. Unlike stoplights, a yellow flag doesn’t automatically turn red. It’s a caution flag that invites you to slow down.

So how do you walk out of a room you still love? How do you leave a place where you once belonged?

Storytellers and scriptwriters know that if you want a universally satisfying ending, then your story needs to have some version of four basic elements: surprise, suspense, transformation, and resolution. Suspense compels and intrigues. Surprise entertains and delights. Transformation inspires and enlivens. Resolution brings peace and closure.

Our experiences of leaving and of being left, of walking away and starting again, and our decisions to do that again depends on so many things, not the least of which is how it went the last time, if there was a last time, and if we’ve ever vowed there would never be a next time.

It’s possible to become very successful in a life that doesn’t fit you. It happens all the time.

Perhaps a helpful thing to remember about desire is this: knowing and naming what you want is not the same as forcing or demanding what you want. Demanding a desire be met is a form of aggression. Naming a desire you have is an honest confession.

Sometimes the decision to leave leads to quick movement and instant change. Often, though, leaving well actually starts with a choice to stay for now so that you can leave when the time is right. This may be years in the making, requiring patience, persistence, and a lot of grace.

When we are identifying the rooms where we live and work and worship, and we begin to discern some of them are still for us and others may not be for us anymore, the stakes are high. Even more so when a room isn’t for us anymore because of who it has left out, kicked out, or excluded.

for beauty to come from ashes, something has to burn.

True peace is an alignment with what we know and what we do, living in congruence with our personal core values, our true identity, the common good, and our life with God. But any kid who has ever had braces knows that getting things into alignment almost always includes discomfort.

We’re meant to move in and out of stress, not to stay stuck in a room of perceived safety. We’re meant to move to the healthy, human rhythm of leaving rooms and finding new ones. This can cause stress, to be sure. But stress doesn’t automatically mean we’re not well.

Anyone who has ever had to hit a deadline knows this reality. Unlike math, when it’s clear that the work is either done or not done, creative work is never really finished. It’s simply due. It’s not about readiness; it’s about timeliness.

Even when things don’t end the way you would have liked, imperfect closure is better than no closure at all. But sometimes you have to fight for it.

Because closure isn’t about everything working out; it’s about acknowledging the ending.

As it turns out, you can also learn a lot from a person who has done it poorly. You can learn a lot about how not to be, what not to say, and what bad leadership looks like.

We work hard to name the gifts and positive summaries of those gains. We are prone to want to count the blessings, to name the lessons, and to share all the ways our pain has been used for good. Maybe there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that desire, but it can keep us from grieving what deserves grief. Something is always lost. And it’s important to let the lost things be lost. Honor what you cannot name with space, compassion, and time.

the ending does not get to define the whole story.

People-pleasing is evidence of an unhealthy emotional system and is not a brush-it-away, bless-your-heart kind of bad habit. When you’re stuck in a vortex of deeply caring what other people think, you’re held captive in a system you’re too afraid to question. People-pleasing is a serious problem and a dangerous cancer, and if you don’t find the courage to name it and the clarity to reject it, the prognosis is grim. It’s keeping you from your best work, your best rest, and it’s sabotaging your freedom. And here’s the secret about people-pleasing no one really tells us: it doesn’t actually please the people. When you’re trying to please the people rather than working to discern from a centered, wholehearted place, your work will never be enough. It will always exhaust you and never fully please those around you. Nobody wins and no one is free. What wounded, anxious people need most is not you as they think you ought to be but the solid presence of a well-differentiated leader who insists on being okay with or without their consent. This is as true for a parent as it is true for a president.

When I’m busy looking for ways to define God, I’m not able to experience God.

My feelings are not my only source of information, but they are always first.

When a plant grows, it goes through necessary change, but it never goes back to a seed. It becomes something new. Maybe there’s no normal to get back to. Maybe there’s only you, doing the next right thing you know to do, and releasing yourself from the hallway.

I know not all homes are permanent. Neither is every room. Maybe most of them aren’t. We get disoriented when we expect the places where we have a taste of belonging to last forever. When they change, we think we’ve been lost or left. We think we’ve done something wrong. We fail to consider that perhaps this home was home for a moment, shelter from a gathering storm, respite from the torrential rains of disappointment, a place to heal for a moment in time even if it’s not forever.

What was is no longer and what will be isn’t quite yet.

This parking lot is in the midst of a transition and grass is growing where it has no business. Even though the dirt isn’t there for keeps, it’s there for now. Seed takes root, burrows into the darkness, and shoots up to the light because that’s what seeds do. They take root and grow even though things won’t be this way for always, even though all is about to change, even though all seems unsettled, unsure, and unstable. The one thing change doesn’t change is growth. I may avoid, resent, or fear the change, but I never regret the growth. Real growth can sometimes feel like shrinking, like smallness, like death.