“I don’t walk away to teach people a lesson. I walk away because I learned mine.” – Steve Harvey, The Steve Harvey Morning Show, October 2, 2025
There’s a difference between walking away because we want someone to feel our absence and walking away because we’ve finally learned something from the experience.
When we want someone to feel our absence, it’s still partly about them. We want them to notice we’re gone, to miss us, to regret what they did or to finally see what we’d been trying to tell them for so long. We might have physically left but we’re still sort of there, waiting on something from the other side. The other kind of walking away is quieter. We’ve quit trying to teach anyone anything and we’re no longer hoping that losing us will make them change. We’ve just stopped asking a situation to be something it keeps showing us it isn’t.
So why do we stay as long as we do? It usually isn’t because we’re foolish or weak. We stay because we remember what it used to be or we can still see what it could be. Sometimes we’ve put in so much time that leaving feels like throwing all of it away. Sometimes there was enough good mixed in with the bad to keep us hopeful. Other times, what comes next just feels scarier than what we already know. We figure that if we explain ourselves one more time or try a little harder, it’ll finally click.
What makes it harder is that people usually tell us who they are, just not with their words. Their actions have been saying it for a while, in whether an apology ever changes anything, in how they act when no one’s watching and in how they talk about us when we’re not around. Their words say something else and we know which one we’d rather hear. So we put what they promised next to what they did and the promise wins again, because believing it is easier than doing something about it.
None of that means people can’t change and I’ve seen it happen. The difference is that when someone really has changed, we don’t have to take their word for it. We can watch their actions start to match what they’ve been saying and not just for a week after a hard conversation, but long enough that we stop waiting for the old pattern to come back. That’s the kind of change worth staying for. Sometimes the harder thing isn’t walking away at all. It’s staying long enough to have the conversation we’d rather avoid, hearing something we might not want to hear and being willing to look at our own part in what happened.
I also get a little hesitant when walking away gets treated as automatically a sign of strength. Protecting our peace, setting boundaries and knowing our worth are sometimes absolutely necessary, but sometimes we use those phrases because they sound a lot better than admitting we just don’t want to deal with something.
So the question isn’t whether we’re strong enough to walk away. It’s whether we understand why we’re doing it. Have we recognized a pattern that keeps repeating? Have we believed what someone’s actions have been telling us or are we still holding out for their words? Have we looked at the part we played in letting it continue?
That last one matters most, because we can leave a person or a situation and still carry the same patterns with us. Somewhere down the road, with a different friend or a different job, we end up frustrated by the same things again. The other person may have been entirely responsible for how they treated us, but there’s still something for us to learn about how we responded. What did we tolerate for too long? What were we afraid to say? What did we ignore because dealing with it would have forced a decision? What did we keep trying to fix that was never ours to fix or keep expecting from someone who had already shown us, more than once, that they couldn’t or wouldn’t give it?
Once we’re willing to look at those things honestly, walking away starts to feel different. We’re no longer walking away hoping someone will understand our value, regret what happened or come back and tell us we were right. We’re walking away because we understand something we didn’t before.
If we walk away because we need them to learn a lesson, we’re still waiting on them.
If we walk away because we learned ours, we don’t have to.
We can wish them well and keep walking.
#MotivationMonday
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