Everyone plans to stop later

Ask anyone still in it when they plan to stop, and you will not get a no. You will get a date, or a condition, or a vague gesture toward some future version of themselves. After the wedding. After this project. When the baby comes. At forty. Nobody says never. Not one person anywhere, holding a cigarette in their hand, will tell you they intend to do this until the day they die. Everybody has the later clause. Everybody always had it. It is the most universal sentence in the whole thing.

Sit with what that means, because it is bigger than it sounds. If every single person in it plans to be out of it eventually, then not one of them is actually choosing this life. They have all already decided against it. What they are doing is postponing the exit, on a rolling basis, for reasons that renew themselves forever and never run out. The decision was made years ago in every case. Only the date keeps moving, and the date is the one part of it that nobody ever stops to examine.

Which puts your old position in a much clearer light. You were not a person who liked this and defended it on the merits. You were a person who had already agreed to leave, renegotiating the timing with someone who never once accepted a date. There was always a reason this month was not the month. Stress, a trip, a bad stretch, a good stretch. That is not indecision on your part. It is what the hook does with anyone who tries to schedule around it. The later clause is how the trap holds people who already want out.

So be clear about what you actually did here. You did nothing radical. You did not take a heroic position or turn into a different species of person from your friends. You held the same intention every one of them holds, the one you have carried since near the beginning, and you finally put it on a date you kept. That is the entire difference between you and the version of you from a year ago. Thank God for the day the date stopped moving. You did not change your mind. You stopped moving the appointment.