What if the moment you wanted to leave were the moment it was becoming yours?
Maybe that’s what you haven’t finished living all the way through.
Today I want to tell you about something I noticed while listening to music, and that wouldn’t leave me alone afterward.
There’s an album I’ve been playing for years. Alma Restaurada, by Lolità and Manu Pozzi.
I put it on while I’m doing other things. I know it by heart. And that’s exactly why I hadn’t really paid attention to it in a long time.
Until one day I found myself looking at the track list.
Track ten is called No me voy — I’m not leaving.
Track eleven is called Perteneces — you belong.
I stopped right there. At the order.
First I’m not leaving. Then you belong.
Never the other way around.
And I thought about all the times I left too early. And about all the women I’ve worked with who did the same thing.
Because deciding — we decide well. Most of the time.
What’s hard is staying.
You begin something you chose clearly. And at some point the uncomfortable part arrives: it’s slower than you expected, something of yours shows up that you didn’t want to look at, someone offers you another path that looks cleaner.
And you go. You switch methods, guides, routes.
With an argument that sounds reasonable: this wasn’t for me.
In the psychology of how processes develop, there’s a stage Bruce Tuckman described,
working on how teams mature: between the initial enthusiasm and the moment something actually starts working, there’s always a phase of friction. Tension, doubt, the urge to quit. And it isn’t a sign that the path is wrong.
It’s the stage where the path becomes yours.
He described it watching groups, but it looks the same in one person’s process.
Whoever leaves during that phase walks away with nothing. Not because they failed. Because they got out before the process finished handing over what it had for them.
In everyday life, it’s simpler than that. And you see it everywhere.
In a relationship, when something isn’t giving what was expected. Nobody says it. It builds. And one day one of the two leaves, convinced it wasn’t right. Sometimes you’re the one who goes. Sometimes you’re the one they leave. Either way, what was being felt almost never got said in time.
At work, when something has weighed on you for months and you never said it to the person you needed to say it to. You quit on the inside long before you quit out loud.
And on the other side of the desk, the same thing happens. Someone decides a person isn’t working out for the team, and makes that call without ever having had the conversation. Without saying what they expected, without asking what was going on. They let them go, convinced they weren’t delivering.
When that happens at the top, it repeats all the way down. A team doesn’t communicate any better than the person leading it.
In the family, where things have been this way so long that nobody names them anymore. You leave the conversation even though you’re still sitting at the table.
With friends, when something cooled off and instead of asking what happened, you let it fade.
And in the work you take on for yourself. You find a coach, a therapist, a guide. If something doesn’t go the way you expected, you look for another. And another. And you end up with pieces from five different people, each one from their own role, not one of them finished.
A pile of paths, and not one of them walked to the end.
They all have something in common, and it took me years to see it: what was actually happening almost never got said.
Decisions got made on what someone assumed.
And it’s so easy to put it on the other person. That they didn’t see, didn’t understand, didn’t give.
But a lot of the time, the other person never knew.
Because when someone puts their part on the table — what they feel, what’s weighing on them, what they expected — something happens that doesn’t happen any other way: the other person puts theirs down too.
And when both sides can finally see the other’s point, that’s when the decision shows up.
The real one. The one that knows what it’s deciding.
Sometimes that decision is to stay. Sometimes it’s to go.
But it isn’t running anymore. It’s a choice made with your eyes open.
Because staying doesn’t mean staying forever, either.
It means staying until the process finishes handing you what it had for you.
And you know that in one of two ways. Sometimes the person guiding you says it: this is what I have for you, this is as far as I go. And sometimes you get there first, with enough clarity to recognize you’ve already picked up what was there.
That happened to me. I stayed to the end with the person who was guiding me, took everything she had to give me, and from there — not before — I knew what came next was walking differently. Building my own.
If I’d left earlier, I’d have walked away with half of what was there for me. Loose information, never settled. And I’d have gone looking somewhere else for what was already right there.
The other thing — leaving without saying anything — isn’t leaving.
It’s letting something go unlived.
And here’s something that was harder to accept than I expected: you almost never see the whole path.
What you see is the next step. Sometimes barely that.
Which is why leaving feels so logical. When the view is short and the ground gets rough, it seems obvious this wasn’t the way.
I learned to honor the steps even when I can only see a short distance ahead.
You don’t need the whole map to walk well. You need to stay long enough for the path to recognize you.
Because what you don’t go all the way through never becomes yours.
And belonging isn’t something you choose.
It’s what shows up once you stayed.
I’m Saskia Fulco.
And this space is for exactly that — so what you started has somewhere to hold, instead of stopping halfway.
No pressure. At your own pace.
If you want to keep going from here, I wrote My Woman’s Journal for exactly this: the processes that hold over time. It’s on Amazon if you’d like to have it close.
And if reading this brought to mind a process of yours you never went all the way through, some paths hold better with someone alongside you. The consulting application is open. I’ll leave it right here for you.
For today, just one question:
What did you leave, right before it became yours?