The Virtue Of Leaving, Sometimes

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, lovers and seekers, those who are lost, and those who are found.

Tonight, I will be reading from the compilation titled, Outlaw Creative. The Geometry Of Life.

We will be hearing from the chapter titled, The Virtue of Leaving, Sometimes.

That being said, let's get started, shall we?

The Virtue Of Leaving, Sometimes.

Leaving is one of the few moral acts that almost never looks moral while it is happening.

From the outside, leaving resembles failure. Retreat. Abdication. Running. We dress staying up as courage because it is visible, measurable, and reassuring. Staying produces artifacts: endurance, sacrifice, grit. Leaving produces absence. Absence does not photograph well. Absence has no press kit.

And yet—some lives are saved not by staying, but by leaving.

We are trained early to treat perseverance as a universal good. “Don’t quit.” “Stick it out.” “Finish what you started.” These sayings are not wrong; they are incomplete. They assume the structure you are inside is sound, that the cost of remaining is proportional, that the system rewards endurance with meaning. When those assumptions fail, perseverance stops being a virtue and becomes a form of slow self-erasure.

There are environments that do not teach you how to live better. They only teach you how to survive worse.

In such places, staying is not noble. It is corrosive.

Leaving, in these cases, is not escape from responsibility. It is a different form of responsibility—one that takes a longer view of cause and effect. The kind that asks not “What do I owe this moment?” but “What will this moment turn me into if I stay?”

That is a harder question. It requires imagination. And courage of a quieter, less applauded kind.

When your father says you did a good job by getting the hell out, he is not praising absence. He is praising conservation. He is naming a truth people avoid saying out loud: sometimes the most responsible act a person can perform is to remove themselves from a system they are not equipped to survive without damage—damage that will inevitably spread to others.

This is especially true when children are involved.

Children do not need proximity at all costs. They need coherence. They need adults whose internal weather is stable enough to be trusted. A parent who stays physically present but spiritually disintegrates does not offer safety; they offer confusion. Children are exquisitely sensitive to internal contradiction. They learn not from what is said, but from what is endured.

Sometimes leaving is the only way to stop teaching the wrong lesson.

This is where the language gets morally slippery, because “leaving” has been used as a justification for all manner of cowardice and neglect. The distinction matters. Leaving is not the same as disappearing. Leaving is not the same as abandoning care. Leaving is not the same as washing one’s hands.

The virtue of leaving lies not in the act itself, but in the orientation behind it.

Leaving can be an act of fidelity—to values that cannot survive where you are. To a future self that must exist for others to thrive. To children who need at least one adult in their orbit who chose integrity over optics.

Leaving, done rightly, is not a rejection of love. It is an acknowledgment of limits.

Limits are not moral failures. They are physical facts of the soul.

There are houses where storms gather. Streets where history repeats itself not because people are stupid, but because the geometry is wrong. You can love the people inside such places and still recognize that remaining there will teach you how to be someone you do not want your children to become.

Leaving interrupts the pattern.

That interruption often looks cruel to those still inside it. This is unavoidable. Systems protect themselves. Narratives form quickly around absence. “If he really cared, he would have stayed.” “If she were stronger, she could handle this.” These stories serve a purpose: they allow the system to remain unexamined.

But the truth is simpler and harsher: not every structure is meant to be endured. Some are meant to be exited.

The idea that “you can always come back” sounds comforting, and sometimes it is true. But it can also function as a kind of moral anesthesia. It assumes the door will remain open, that time is neutral, that reentry does not carry cost. Often, coming back requires becoming someone you worked very hard not to be anymore.

Leaving is not reversible in the way people pretend. It changes you. It should. If it doesn’t, it probably wasn’t leaving—it was just distance.

And yet, the fact that leaving alters you is not an argument against it. It is the argument for taking it seriously.

There is a deep confusion in modern moral thinking between endurance and goodness. We praise those who survive hell without asking whether hell needed to be survived at all. We turn suffering into a credential. We assume that if someone walked through fire, the fire must have been necessary.

But some fires are just fires.

The virtue of leaving, sometimes, is that it refuses to baptize unnecessary damage as destiny.

When you leave, you say: this does not get to define me. This does not get to teach my children what love looks like. This does not get to claim my entire future as payment for a past I did not choose.

That is not selfishness. That is stewardship.

And here is the hardest part: leaving does not guarantee relief. It only guarantees honesty. Loneliness may follow. Regret may visit. Memory will not politely stay behind. The storm may still rumble, as you put it. But it rumbles at a distance that allows thought. Reflection. Choice.

From that distance, something else becomes possible: gratitude without captivity. Love without entanglement. Honor without self-destruction.

You can keep faith with the living by keeping faith with the dead moments that made them—without living inside those moments forever.

Leaving allows memory to become memory instead of a permanent present.

So yes: sometimes leaving is virtuous. Not always. Not easily. Not without cost. But when staying requires you to fracture your inner compass, when endurance demands the slow betrayal of your better instincts, when proximity teaches the wrong lessons to those watching you most closely—then leaving is not a failure of love.

It is love, expressed in a longer sentence.

And when someone says, “You can always come back,” the honest response is not agreement or refusal. It is discernment. Coming back is not a right; it is a question. One that must be asked with the same seriousness as the leaving itself.

Some doors are meant to remain open.

Some are meant to close quietly behind you.

Wisdom is knowing which is which—and having the courage to turn the handle either way.

You didn’t get the hell out to escape your life.

You got out to make sure there was still a life worth standing in later.

That counts.