When is it too much? When do you finally say enough? Some people’s threshold is very high, reaching for the heavens and above. “They have the patience of a saint,” people would say. Others are so low not even Lucifer in his realm can find it, settling in the deep core of the earth to simmer and burn. All it takes is a look or maybe one certain person walking into the room and their patience is gone, flying out the window as if the very demons of hell were nipping at its tail.

There are situations where walking away can be the most difficult act you will ever play. The one that not only will affect your life, but those around you that you thought you loved and those you still do. How do you change your life without destroying theirs? Yet if you don’t change, won’t your life be destroyed? How do you betray those who depend on you in order to keep what little sanity you have left by leaving them in the frozen wasteland that has become life? Or the scalding desert that has become your hell? What is that final act that forces you to say “I have had enough” and you walk away, never to look back.

How many people can you save by saying “No more” to the demon who possesses the power to harm those around them? How many will you sacrifice to end the misery? Strengths come in many levels, many ways. The strength to keep going, to fight that which yearns to destroy everything you hold dear. The strength to say “Enough” and walk away to live, to breathe, another day.

Some say those who refuse to step out of the darkness that has become their lives, that stay and just endure are cowards. Are they? Just because they see no way out. That the demon that holds their life in its hands has every exit sealed shut with vicious words and violence promised to those they love, or to them if they dare to seek the light. Maybe they have been beaten so far down that there is no strength left to fight for what most of us take for granted. Freedom to think and choose for ourselves. Freedom to say, “Enough.”

~ © Heidi Barnes