And Here's Why You Probably Should
This is not the advice that most people will tell you. This is not the advice that most people expect to hear. Most of us grew up with some kind of puritanical dogma of standing your ground, rising up to the challenges set before us, being a man and facing what comes head-on.
But what if you flipped all that on its head and just... ran away?
One of my best friends says in this life, you have to choose your hard. Now, I'm not saying that every time you face a problem or a difficult situation, you should change towns and change your name. But I am saying, choose your hard. Have a job you hate? Staying in that job will be hard. Quitting that job and walking into the unknown of finding a new job will be hard. Choose your hard.
Stuck in a bad relationship with a partner who hurts more than helps? A partner that makes you cry more than laugh? Staying will be hard. Leaving and starting over will be hard. Choose your hard.
Living in a place that you hate? Staying there will be hard, day in and day out. Moving to a new place, making new friends, feeling like you have no idea what's going on will be hard. Choose your hard.
And I'm not saying this glibly. And to those of you who are in situations right now that you cannot change, or leave, or walk away from, I see you and I know that hard, trust me I do. What I'm talking about, is when we have the god-given privilege and have put in the absolute work to have the tools, the skills, the determination, and the courage to leave, or change, or shift, or run, and we don't do it? Well, that's choosing a really hard hard.
It seems leaving and going somewhere new is easier for many people now than ever before. Social media lets us see glimpses of life in far-off places, plane tickets (though exceptionally expensive) are available at the push of a few buttons, online jobs, digital nomads, remote workers and Starlink have made it so we can work from essentially anywhere, GPS and Google Maps mean that we can literally get in our car and drive off into unknown lands, and somehow never get (geographically) lost.
And yet, a lot of us stay stuck, fighting some battle that we think is going to make a difference one day, when the truth is, everyone is so busy fighting their own battles that no one is really paying attention to you. No one is paying attention to how well you do that job that you hate. Or how good you are at acting like you like a place that you can't stand. And staying in that bad relationship to show others how committed you are? How loving you are? Flip it around and commit to yourself, love yourself instead.
I recently moved out of Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, a place I have called home for eleven years. And it was hard to move there. I drove there (once successfully, once not so much--that's another blog altogether) and I chose that hard. Moving to a foreign country with two rescue pit bulls, starting a whole new life, making friends, working for $2 an hour--which to be fair was plenty of money back then--that was a hard that I wore like a badge of honor. Learning to garden with a machete, taking baths in the ocean when there was no water for days, riding rusty bikes down dirt roads with no lights, finding snakes, scorpions, and spiders in my house, that was my hard. And I fucking loved it.
But slowly, as things change, I changed, Puerto Viejo changed, and I found myself waking up every day hating my life, a life that I had worked so hard to create. It took about two years of me fighting this internal battle, trying to make my edges fit where I just didn't fit anymore. And then the universe did what she does: she got loud.
She got loud, and pushy, and handsy because I'll tell you what: The universe will not let you find peace in a place you are not meant to be. Read that again.
And so, things started to get harder and harder. My vacation rentals sat empty for months while my living expenses soared. One of my four rescue dogs got savagely attacked while walking on the same beach path where I had walked dogs for eleven years. I woke up with a dead rat in my bed one morning--courtesy of my beloved cat, Bill. I stopped enjoying the beach, or going at all for that matter. I dreaded leaving my house, going to the store, eating at the same restaurants, everything felt HARD.
So before I knew it, I was making plans to leave. Pack up the car, load up the animals, luckily the husband was a willing captive, and within five weeks of deciding it was time to move and leave this chapter for a new one, we were living in new place, on the other side of Costa Rica, trading in the beach for the mountains, the warm waters of the Caribbean for the cold rivers of this rocky terrain, a mere nine-hour drive from our "home".
And it has been hard, I don't have friends here--yet. My husband hasn't found work here--yet. We're still learning how this place works, and learning is awkward and something you think you'll leave behind when school finishes, but that just isn't true.
If you are lucky enough to keep living, and I truly mean lucky, then life is going to keep being hard, and you have to keep choosing your hard. And if that means running away from something that just isn't working, then my god, you run like Laura Dern with velociraptors hot on your tail.
Because what's the point of suffering in a place you hate, that no longer resonates? No one is coming to give you an A on your life report card. Because no one has any idea what they're doing themselves. So, again, if you are blessed enough to have the freedom of choice, and movement, don't waste that freedom. This ride doesn't last forever and you really don't know when you're getting kicked off, so try to squeeze as much enjoyment out of it as you possibly can.
