I know this peculiar argument from my own thinking: I’ve already put so much time into this. The sentence can refer to a relationship, a job, a project, a belief or a path I chose a long time ago. In itself, it says nothing about whether what I have stayed with still suits me today. And yet it carries a remarkable force. Five years feel different from five months, twenty years different from two. The longer something has been part of my life, the harder it seems to become to question it. Not necessarily because it has grown more valuable, but because an ending suddenly raises questions about all the time that came before it. If I leave now, was it all for nothing? Was I wrong? Should I have seen earlier what I can see now? Thoughts like these can bind someone to something even though the real question has long since become a different one: would I choose this again today if I had not already been in it for so long?
It took me a long time to understand how strongly past investments can influence our present decisions. In psychology, there is the concept of costs that have already been incurred: time, energy, money, hope and emotion have been invested and cannot be recovered, and precisely because of that, we find it difficult to let something go. In everyday life, this mechanism does not need a scientific name. You can feel it. I’ve already built so much. I’ve tried for so long. We’ve known each other for so many years. I didn’t come all this way just to turn back shortly before the end. Any of these thoughts may be reasonable. Perseverance has value, relationships go through difficult periods, and not every project should be abandoned at the first sign of resistance. But the past cannot guarantee that staying is still the right thing in the present. Time proves, first of all, only that something has lasted a long time.
What occupies me particularly is our need to make sense of our own life story in retrospect. I want to be able to believe that my decisions had meaning. If I have devoted ten years to something and then have to acknowledge that I no longer want to live within it, that can easily touch my sense of who I am. An ending can feel as though I am rejecting my former self. I see that differently now. The fact that something no longer fits today does not automatically make the years before it wrong. Someone may once have been very close to me and no longer belong in my life today. A job may have shaped me, supported me and taught me a great deal, and still become too restrictive at some point. A belief may have given me direction during one stage of my life and later cease to sustain me. I do not have to devalue the past in order to allow it to become the past.
Relationships, in particular, show me how deeply this connection can run. Shared years are not an abstract number. They are made up of memories, places, conversations, crises, habits, people you both know, perhaps a home and an idea of who you have become together. That is why it would feel too superficial to me to say that someone simply stays out of convenience. Often, far more is attached to it. When someone leaves, they do not leave only a person or a situation. They also leave behind a version of their own story. And even when something has not felt alive for a long time, it can still hurt to realise that all those years are not leading to the ending you once imagined for them. I have noticed in myself how easily hope can then change direction. I am no longer necessarily hoping because I can truly see what lies ahead, but because I want to rescue the past.
It is similar with paths we have chosen for ourselves. The longer I identify with something, the harder it becomes to imagine moving away from it. If I have spent decades telling myself that I am a certain kind of person, that I stand for certain values or that I am heading in a particular direction, change can quickly feel like disloyalty. I know this inner hesitation. It is less a fear of the new than a question of what becomes of the identity I have held until now. A change of direction affects more than the future. It forces me to look at the past through different eyes. Decisions I once defended may suddenly appear more nuanced. That can be uncomfortable because we like to believe that we have remained true to ourselves over the years. But perhaps being true to myself does not mean continuing every decision I once made. Perhaps it can also mean recognising that I am no longer the same person who made it.
It becomes even more difficult where perseverance takes on a moral value. Giving up quickly sounds like weakness; staying sounds like strength of character. Someone who keeps going for a long time is regarded as dependable. Someone who ends a path they once began often feels they have to explain themselves. I carried these ideas within me too. They can lead me to stop asking why I am staying and instead simply take pride in the fact that I have stayed. Consistency then becomes a value in itself. Yet it can require just as much courage to acknowledge a limit as it does to keep pushing it further away. I do not want to turn letting go into some romantic ideal. Leaving is not automatically wiser than staying. There are situations in which enduring, repairing and trying again allows something valuable to emerge. For me, the decisive difference lies deeper: am I still staying because of what exists between me and this situation today, or am I mainly defending what I invested in it yesterday?
Here, too, I recognise much of what occupied me while writing I – Your Best Liar. Self-deception does not require an obvious lie. It can arise from a completely truthful sentence: ‘I’ve already given so much.’ That may well be true. The deception begins only when the automatic conclusion becomes that I therefore have to keep giving. I have learned for myself that our inner explanations are often so difficult to see through precisely because they contain something genuine. We do not invent everything. We simply shift the weight. The years, the effort and the memories become so important that the present barely gets a voice. And at some point, I may no longer be defending what I am actually living in, but rather the wish not to have been wrong in the decisions I made before.
What I now find comforting is the thought that an ending does not erase the value of an experience retrospectively. Not everything that was once right has to remain right forever. A book that shaped me at twenty does not have to give me the same answers at fifty. Someone may have accompanied me through an important part of my life without that creating a claim on all the years still to come. A dream may have taken me a long way and still come to an end at the point where another begins. Perhaps it is our idea of permanence that makes so much of this difficult. We like to believe that something which had meaning proves that meaning by lasting. But some things were meaningful precisely because they were there for a time.
When I notice today that the main reason I am giving myself for continuing a story is simply its length, I pay attention. Not because that means I have to leave immediately, but because the thought reveals something. The years behind me seem almost to say: after everything you have carried to get here, you cannot simply move on now. And sometimes I imagine that time could step out of the room for a moment. No five, ten or twenty years, no invested effort, no memory of how often I have already stayed. Only what is still here today. In that quiet image, the question changes. It is no longer about how much I would lose if I left. It becomes much simpler and, at the same time, more uncomfortable: if I were encountering this place for the first time today, would I still choose it?