By Zerida Mponye

It takes a lot of courage to take ourselves back from the things that threaten to break us. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand what it means to know you have to get out while, at the same time, coming up with tonnes of very convincing reasons on why you must stay. You’ve convinced yourself that that habit, that thing, that person won’t be so bad one day; that you need it/them, that if you try just one more time, it just might get better, that you’ll learn to control it, or yourself. That you’ll deal with it. So you stay one extra day, hoping for the best –not once giving yourself the chance to accept that it’s not going to get better. That’s what hope feels like in hopeless situations; like reaching for the wind and hoping that it will stay.

Eventually, your reasons stop making sense, even to you, and you make the decision to take the plunge. What you don’t realize at this point is that, as hard as it was to get to that decision, it’s not nearly as hard as the execution. Because even though this thing, this person, this habit you’re letting go of has been eating you up from the inside, it still feels like home. You’re used to it, it’s predictable –it’s become normal! Do you see how twisted that is?

So you start with the reasons again. Perhaps you’re rushing. They don’t understand, you reason. How could they? They haven’t been there. But you have. And you know you have to get out. But the unknown is such a scary place. You don’t know how to be without this thing that has been a cancer in your life for as long as you remember.

If you’ve been there, you know how difficult it is to take that first step in the new direction that will change your life; how scary it is to venture into a world of the unknown. But as a wise man once said, “Don’t let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.”

Change is scary, but change is also inevitable. And it could be good too.