You are in a waiting room, holding your phone, reading the same message for the third time. It is from someone who needs something from you. Everyone seems to need something from you right now. Part of you wants to answer. Another part wants to walk out the door and keep walking.
Right behind that thought comes the guilt. What kind of person wants to quit?
I’d like to offer you a different question. Not “Should I quit?” but “What kind of stepping back is this?”
In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, I describe three reasons a person might step back. The first is futility. You are pouring effort into something that is not moving, and the effort is turning into despair. The second is recovery. Your tank is empty, and stepping back is how you refill it so you can return. The third is toxicity. The place, the group, or the habit is itself doing harm, and staying costs more than leaving.
From the outside, these look the same. On the inside they are very different. Futility asks you to change your approach. Recovery asks you to rest. Toxicity asks you to leave, or at least to put up a wall. When you name which one it is, something loosens. Shame has much less to hold on to once you know what you are actually doing.
Keisha, a woman in the book, shows how this works. For six months she went to every protest, made daily calls, and stayed up late reading every new outrage. Then she crashed. She spent three guilty months away. When she came back, she came back differently: one issue, one organization already doing good work, five hours a week, and one weekend off a month. A year later she was still going. Her time away had not ended her commitment. It had made it possible.
Psychologists have a name for why this matters. In self-determination theory, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan found that people need three things to stay well and motivated: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is the sense that your actions are your own choice. When you cannot leave a role, even one you love, it slowly stops feeding you and starts draining you. The work may not have changed at all. Your freedom to choose it did.
That is why stepping back can be an act of loyalty to the thing you care about. Choosing it again is what keeps a commitment alive. Duty with no exit door tends to go sour.
I am seventy-six. In twenty-five years of addictions work and twenty-two years of coaching, I listened to many good people who believed they were not allowed to rest. I wanted to tell them then what I want to tell you now: your survival itself is a victory. You do not have to earn a pause by collapsing first.
So here is the question to carry today. Do I need to step back from futility, for recovery, or from toxicity? You don’t have to decide what to do about it yet. Just name it.
If this is a hard season, Staying Strong in Unsteady Times walks through the rest of the toolkit one small step at a time. It is written for anyone carrying a heavy load, whether the weight comes from health, money, work, family, loss, or the news.
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