"just leave"

a disjointed essay on the difference of leaving and running away.

Dec 08, 2025

there’s a trend going around on instagram right now which says “don’t ask me for life advice because I’ll tell you to just leave.

leave the relationship.

leave the job.

leave the country.

leave me if you need to.

because the one thing about me is that I’m going to leave when it’s time to go.”

This may contain: a person sitting on a train looking out the window at the ocean and mountains in the distance

the first time I saw one of these reels, I nodded my head and hit the save button. “yeah,” I thought to myself, “don’t overstay your welcome. there’s nothing worse than staying for too long.”

but the more I thought about it, the more I began to dislike this mindset.

I was discussing with someone recently about the state of our generation (gen z) and whether or not we’re ‘doing okay’ mental health wise. I said yes, because people are speaking more openly about their mental health (and therefore destigmatising these conversations), allowing us to first recognise the problem before we address it. he said no, because we have a loneliness crisis and boys are being indoctrinated into craving cheap dopamine hits like p*rn and we spend more time on technology instead of being in real life.

I think we’re both right.

on one hand, we’re having more conversations about how we’re feeling. people are opening up to each other, and one way to encourage better mental health is community. whether it’s between friends or scrolling on the internet, I believe there are more times than ever that we feel seen — where someone can relate to our experience and we feel less alone.

on the other hand, I think sharing our life on the internet is fabricating connection. instead of hanging out with our friends in real life, we catch up with their most recent instagram posts and stories. we don’t need to “meet up for coffee” because we can see their job updates (linkedin), life updates (instagram), movie watching history (letterbox), eating history (beli or yelp), activity history (strava), reading history (goodreads), and listening history (spotify).

the same technology that has promised connection is depriving us from it.

This may contain: an image of people in front of a painting on the wall with orange bubbles above them

I grew up on the internet. I grew up posting my life on instagram, hitting my first 10,000 followers when I was just 14. I’ve been a monetized social media content creator (yuck, but bear with me) for five years.

I’ve been invited to those ‘influencer parties’ you see on social media, one time being front-row at a private tyga concert while wearing a skirt that barely fit on my waist and definitely was not supposed to be worn with underwear.

I’ve been sent more clothes than you can imagine. new shoes every month, with a five-shoe running rotation even though I ran maybe once a week. I had a corner of my room cluttered with PR that I would hand out to my friends like christmas every time they came over.

I started posting on instagram because I wanted “to help people feel less alone” — but maybe I’m contributing to the problem.

instead of reaching out to people in their life, my direct messages are flooded with people who saw me talk about my breakup on instagram. they share stories of when they got their heart broken and ask me what they should do about it, or if I have any advice for how they should navigate their life.

I wonder if they ever talk to the people around them about how they’re feeling, or if they desperately type out something raw and vulnerable to someone they don’t know on instagram and close the app.

(as much as I would love to answer people, to truly make people feel less alone by engaging in conversations and providing the connection they so deeply crave, I can’t. not only because I don’t have the emotional capacity to be someone’s support, but also because they’ve formed a parasocial relationship with me, a content creator).

as a generation, we seem to be unable to sit in the discomfort of our own thoughts.

even further, we seem to be unable to sit in the discomfort of our own life.

this idea of “just leave” when things get hard toes the line between being emotionally intelligent and completely out of touch and avoidant. first and foremost, the freedom and flexibility of “just leaving” is something not everyone is offered. maybe you don’t have a few thousand dollars of disposable income to quit your job and solo travel for a week. maybe you have bills to pay and kids to pick up from school, or a mortgage along with your breakup. but if we look past that (and that’s a big thing to look past), we can’t keep encouraging people to leave when things are hard.

*there is an exception to this rule, as there always is. for example, if you’re in an abusive relationship and it is safe to do so then yes, you should leave, and you should leave in quite a hurry. or if you do have the financial or emotional safety net of being able to make a drastic change in your life and you want to, then definitely do it. no one is stopping you.

as someone who has lived in three places (for at least a year in each) in my 20s, I know a lot about making a drastic move. I moved from california to london to new england. I’ve moved apartments every year since the beginning of college, never being in one single space for more than a year. I pride myself on being able to throw myself wholeheartedly into the wind and knowing life will catch me. and I am sick of it.

I want to stay still for a bit. I want to build roots in a place. I want to make connections and not have to preface new friendships with an end date. I want to own furniture and decorate a room that I will live in for more than a year. I want to become so disgustingly familiar with a place that I can say “I’ve been coming here for years.”

I no longer want to be the person who “will be okay because she’s always been okay” — while that may be true, I no longer want to be the one who is known to be strong.

I want to stay when things get hard and I want to see them become okay again. I want to stop running away from my life, rebuilding my sense of ‘normal’ every few years.

what a privilege it is to have found community in every place I’ve lived. what a privilege it has been to test myself in these different ways, to throw myself against the fabric of life to learn my limits. what a privilege it is to have grown into the person I am today. but what a privilege it will be to decide to settle down.

we need connection now more than ever. we need to be surrounded by people who we love and who inspire us and we need to engage with them in conversations that don’t involve being on the phone. (as much as I love my long-distance friendships and I am so grateful for them, I do often feel exhausted from texting or staring at a screen when I facetime them).

I know the importance of community in my life, which is why my next move (which is inevitable given the trajectory of my career thus far) is constrained to places where pieces of my community already exist. this might mean I move to cities where I have loose connections, the beginnings of a community I can explore. this might mean I move back to london, or california, or stay on the east coast.

I think it’s important to leave, yes, but I think it’s also important to come back. to know that wherever you end up going, you can always come back.

because you can’t keep leaving. you can’t keep running from your life in hopes that it’ll solve your problems. at some point, you’ll realise that the things you were fighting in the city has followed you to a beach in the bahamas and you’ll have to face them head on.

so stop telling people to “just leave.” yes, know when you’ve overstayed your welcome. yes, leave the abusive situations if it’s safe to do so. but no, don’t “just leave” when times get hard. learn to sit in the discomfort of life. build your roots. find your community. experience hardships. stop starting over to prove to yourself that you can. “just leave,” but don’t run away.

thank you for reading my messy thoughts — the ‘still warm’ takes on society, social media, and navigating adulthood.

if you’re interested in personal wellness, that’s housed here

& see my visual content about being in my 20s on instagram ⭐️