He saw that he could acknowledge that leaving would be terrible, yet that if it mattered to him enough, he was free to do it anyway, and to deal as responsibly as he could with the resulting awfulness as the price he was willing to pay. Facing this truth – that the choice would come with costs, and that he could elect to shoulder them – gave him the psychological room for maneuver he’d been missing. He left. It was awful. But life moved on.
