Enough Was Already Enough

I Was Dancing to My Exit Before I Left

In the summer of 2015, I rented a cottage in Michigan.

My best friend and her husband came.
My husband came from Brazil, where we were living at the time.

On the surface, it was a week away. A break. Something light.

But I was already struggling.

In my marriage.
In Brazil.
In myself.

I didn’t have language for it yet.
I wasn’t making decisions.
I wasn’t planning an exit.

But something in me was already done.

I just couldn’t act on it yet.

That week, my best friend and I spent most of our time practicing choreography.

I had rented a suite in Las Vegas for my 50th birthday and told my closest friends they could come on one condition:

We were doing a lip sync battle.

I had even bought inflatable microphones for it. Everyone got one. Everyone took one home.

It was ridiculous and fabulous and exactly the kind of thing I would do.

So there we were, in this quiet Michigan cottage, running the same song over and over again.

“Enough Is Enough (No More Tears).”

At the time, it felt fun. Dramatic. A little over the top.

We danced. We laughed. We repeated the moves until we got them right.

Our husbands were… less amused.

But we kept going.

Again and again.

“Enough is enough is enough is enough…”

I didn’t think anything of it.

Not really.

I wasn’t sitting there thinking, this is my life.
I wasn’t connecting it to my marriage.
I wasn’t making meaning.
I was just… doing the choreography.

But I remember something now that I couldn’t see then.

There was a part of me that felt it.

Not consciously. Not in a way I could act on.
But in my body.

In the repetition.
In the insistence of the song itself.

“I can’t go on, I can’t go on…”

That part of me already knew.

It knew I had reached a threshold I wasn’t willing to name yet.
It knew something wasn’t working that wasn’t going to work.
It knew I was crossing something… even if my life hadn’t caught up to it yet.

So instead of leaving then…

I danced it.
I practiced it.
I embodied it in a way that was safe enough to access, without disrupting everything.

And that’s the part I think we don’t talk about enough.

The moment when a woman is done doesn’t always look like leaving.
It often looks like something much quieter.

Much more indirect.

It comes out in strange places.

In the music she chooses.
In the things she repeats.
In the way her body starts telling the truth before her life does.

We think the leaving is the moment.

It’s not.

The leaving comes later.

The real moment is when something in you says:

enough

And you feel it.
Even if you don’t act on it yet.

I listened to that song again today. And this time, it didn’t feel dramatic.
It felt accurate.

“There’s nothing left for us here…”

Not as a declaration.
As a recognition.

That part of me wasn’t wrong.
It was early.
It was ahead of my decisions, ahead of my circumstances, ahead of what I was willing to disrupt.

But it was right.

And looking back now, I can feel it clearly.

I wasn’t just preparing for a birthday trip.
I was rehearsing a truth.

~Stephanie