How do you know when it is time to leave?

The short answer: **you know it is time when most of your energy is going into managing the thing rather than being in it** — and you will know that long before you have reasons good enough to say out loud.

Waiting for the reasons is why people stay years past the point. The reasons arrive late, and often they never arrive at all, because most things do not end with a justification.

The evidence is in your attention, not in events

People wait for an incident — a bad enough argument, a final indignity, one clear wrong. Sometimes it comes. Usually it does not, and the absence gets read as proof there is nothing wrong.

Better evidence: what is your attention doing? Are you rehearsing conversations before you have them? Do you feel relief when a plan is cancelled? Do you check whether the mood has changed before you say anything ordinary?

That is management. And a relationship, a job or a city that requires continuous management has already told you.

The two questions that cut through

**Would you choose it today?** Not would you have chosen it, and not is it bad — if it were entirely new, freely available and free of consequence, would you take it? People almost always know this instantly, and almost always discount the answer immediately, which is itself the answer.

**What are you staying for?** Then check whether that is a reason or a cost. "The years I have put in" is a cost. "The disruption" is a cost. Costs are not reasons, and sunk ones are not reasons at all — though they feel more like reasons than anything else, which is exactly why people stay.

What leaving does not fix

Worth saying plainly, because this is where people are misled.

Leaving changes the situation and not the person, and whatever you brought will be waiting at the next one. If the pattern is that everything goes stale at two years, leaving will produce a fresh thing that goes stale at two years.

That does not mean stay. It means know which you are doing, so the leaving is a decision rather than a habit.

When staying is the braver option

Sometimes it is. Staying to do the difficult specific work — the conversation, the change in yourself, the thing you have been avoiding for three years — is harder than going, and going is often the avoidant option wearing courage's clothes.

The tell: if you left, would you be relieved to be away, or relieved not to have had the conversation? The second one follows you.

Where this is in the book

*The Unlocked Door* is a scene about somebody realising that nothing has been keeping them where they are for quite some time.