Down those stairs!

What if I say men prefer familiarity over growth. It sounds cynical, but it isn’t. It’s biology wearing a tie. The mind clings to what it knows, even when what it knows hurts. Familiarity is a soft drug; numbing, reliable, quietly lethal. And men, especially, are trained to find comfort in discomfort. To endure. To call decay as discipline. To mistake tolerance for strength.

I stayed that way. Long after the dignity ran out. Not because I enjoyed it; because I understood it. I knew the terrain. The angles of insult. The rhythms of neglect. There’s something unsettling about how easily the mind can make a home out of a wound, just because it’s been there long enough.

It didn’t fall apart. It thinned. Expectations lowered themselves without asking. Conversations ended a fraction too early. Disappointments stopped being memorable and started being routine. We kept resetting the arrangement as if repetition might turn into repair. Each reset quieter than the last. Nothing dramatic. Just erosion.

I don’t believe in villains here. I really don’t. Everyone carries a weight that bends them differently. Some break inward, others outward. What looks like arrogance is often fear standing straighter than it feels. What reads as cruelty might just be someone trying not to drown. People are contradictions. Structures simply trap those contradictions and call it order.

Over time, an understanding formed. It would take more than it gave, and I would pretend not to notice; as long as it didn’t ask for the parts of me I was quietly reserving. We violated that understanding often. Apologies were implied. Nothing was corrected. Life went on.

And me; I have this habit. I move on. Not heal. Not forgive. Just move on, as if the scar doesn’t exist. I call it resilience, but I know it’s avoidance. There’s no closure, only continuation. The wound stays; I just stop looking at it. Like learning to walk with a limp and calling it posture.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s just survival. Not fixing things. Not confronting them. Just outpacing them. Keep walking. Pretend the cut is part of your skin. It’s a kind of emotional minimalism; you stop expecting better, and the absence of disappointment starts feeling like peace. But it isn’t growth. It’s a private truce: You hurt me; I won’t speak of it. Let’s call it even.

That’s how people; men especially; get stuck. Not because we lack courage, but because we’ve absorbed the idea that suffering is part of the deal. The way previous generations stayed where they were, long after the air thinned. We call it maturity. Most days, it’s just inertia.

The danger isn’t pain. Pain is honest. The danger is normalising it. Once pain becomes expected, you stop reaching for anything beyond it. You start confusing endurance for identity. And slowly, without noticing, you build a life around tolerating what should’ve been intolerable.

Someone asked me what could be done to make me take it back. I didn’t have an answer. Not because I was being difficult; because there wasn’t one. This wasn’t a negotiation. It wasn’t a reaction to conditions. It was me noticing that something in me had already shifted.

Someone else warned me it was risky. That it could make or break what comes next. I listened. I always do. And I kept one word from it; the only one that stayed.

NEXT!

Not better. Not safer. Just ahead.

I don’t believe the next place will be different. Systems repeat themselves. People do too. I’m not walking toward relief or redemption. This isn’t escape. It’s movement. There are things outside this structure; quiet, unremarkable things; a life; that have begun to matter more than staying intact inside it. I didn’t notice when the balance changed. Only that it did.

I know I’ll cry when I walk down those stairs. Not because I was happy here; because I was here. Because time leaves a mark, even when it hurts. Grief doesn’t check whether something was good for you. It just arrives to mark that something mattered, once.

I’m not leaving because everything was wrong. I’m leaving because standing still has started to cost more than moving. Because familiarity, for all its comfort, has begun to feel heavier than uncertainty.

So I’ll let myself feel it. The ache. The nostalgia I didn’t earn. The sadness that doesn’t mean regret. And then I’ll keep going.

Not because I believe it will be different. 

But because I believe I should try.

And maybe that’s all this ever was.

Not a break, not a beginning, just a man finally choosing motion over the familiar shape of staying. 

What happens after that doesn’t belong to this story.