A couple of years ago, around Easter, I wrote what ended up becoming one of the most widely read pieces I have ever published for Unleashed. Called Noli Me Tangere—Latin for “Touch Me Not”—it was built around a tattoo I got of Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, and reflected on what those words meant to me about boundaries.
This Easter Monday, I find myself thinking instead about consequences. Even Jesus, after all the love and healing he gave, was still rejected and betrayed, tortured and killed. And when he rose from the dead, he didn’t stick around begging to be taken back or trying to convince anyone that they’d made a mistake. He simply left, and ascended to his highest form.
I have spent a considerable amount of my life leaving: jobs, relationships, cities, old versions of myself. Leaving has never scared me as much as staying somewhere I no longer felt safe or appreciated. And if there is one thing I can say with complete conviction, it is that every single time I walked away from a person or place that underestimated my worth, my life got exponentially better.
I have quit jobs with nowhere else to go as soon as I understood I was being overlooked and undervalued. I have resigned from professional environments where my work was excellent, my contribution was obvious, and yet the recognition or promotion didn’t follow. I didn’t waste months trying to enlighten my superiors about the error of their ways. I made an exit strategy and I executed it. And every time I did, I rose to better titles, better roles, and better opportunities. More interesting work quickly followed, along with more freedom and even more money. In some cases, I was invited back to those same workplaces I had left, this time on far better terms and much more appreciated.
The same has been true in my personal life, although those lessons came with no shortage of pain. I stayed in marriages and relationships long after it was time to go, through physical abuse, monstrous cheating, blatant stealing, and unimaginable lies. I have learned the very hard way that waiting for early signs of disrespect to ripen into full catastrophe gets you nowhere good and nowhere fast. A glimpse or two of disregard may be an anomaly. But repeated infractions, especially after you have named them and asked for them to stop, are a pattern, and a warning. So now, as soon as I see that respect has left the room, I leave too. And every single time I do, my life opens to more peace, more self-esteem, and more room for the people who will love me and meet me in a way that allows me to love them back the way I most want to: safely, freely, abundantly, even lavishly.
There is something very real about the energy you release into the world when you refuse to settle into structures that discount you, when you refuse to collude in your own diminishment, and when you no longer ignore the misalignment between what you’re bringing to the table and what you’re getting back. When you no longer shrink to fit the tiny imagination of a person who cannot see the value of what is right in front of them, life responds and people do too. You stop bleeding out and leaking energy into people or places that cannot or will not nourish you back. And then all that energy, all that attention, all that vitality, pours right back into you.
The greatest power you will ever know is the willingness to walk away from anyone or anything that makes you feel like shit. And one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is to stop wasting your life trying to explain your worth to people committed, consciously or not, to misunderstanding it. Let those people lose you. It will save you years. The right ones will stay and do the work of figuring things out with you, or they will return ready to treat you properly, with the respect you deserve. They will not need to be convinced of the value in doing so. The ones who don’t are not meant for you. And in leaving, they clear the space for what is. Because I promise you: the best is yet to come.
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Listen to Sheila’s personal reading of “Let Them Lose You”.
Sheila Paylan is an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations. Now based in Yerevan, she regularly consults for a variety of international organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and governments.
