The power of "walk away" energy

Why women are telling me they are okay with going to jail

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In the last week, I have been mulling over a power that everyone is aware of and technically has, but oftentimes feels is not possible: the power of walking away.

This feels like an overused cliché and you might be wondering what exactly I mean by “walking away.” In my mind, walking away is accepting a worst case scenario in the short- or mid-term in order to walk away from the safety net, the thing you think is necessary to your survival.

This could mean divorcing an abusive rich guy and representing yourself pro-se in family court, staying on a friend’s couch because you now have no money. It could mean quitting a toxic job without another one lined up, and stomaching the idea that you won’t know how to pay your mortgage or rent next month and might have to scramble to figure something out. It could mean not having healthcare for a moment in time, but realizing that your boss and work culture were giving you such PTSD and affiliated physical health conditions that you now are healing despite the short-term risk of no healthcare.

In my work helping people tell sensitive stories about power—I see people giving “walk away” energy all the time when they are willing to accept sizable risk in order to speak something into truth. People who have a true story they must share are told “you are committing career suicide” or “you’ll go bankrupt” (sometimes even “you’ll get sanctioned by a court or go to jail”). They’re told by friends and family “just move on” to “happier things”—and sometimes that is valid advice, as no one should be totally subsumed by their stories or past chapters.

But some people have been through so much of life trying to wear them down and have survived in spite of it that the idea of playing the more risk-averse (read: “sane” and orderly) game of staying in line is actually the most insane compromise they could imagine making. Though many of us might not understand, people who have crossed this psychological threshold are actually happier walking away or not playing by the rules that are muzzling or hurting them. Not because they are masochistic. But because they want to be liberated and free.

Earlier this week, a woman who was a source for a story I worked on called to share that the man at the center of her story—a man who she alleges had drugged and raped her—sent her a cease-and-desist, meaning that the next step if she did not “cease” talking about him would be a defamation lawsuit. (That is, if he chooses to file and make the whole thing a public record.)

But she was not panicking. She was calm and resolved. This woman told me that if she needed to spend all of her earnings on legal fees, she would. She would downsize and reinvent, as she knows what that is like—a few years ago her house had burned down and she got divorced, and she had to rebuild from scratch. Today she has several thriving businesses and a fruitful dating life. She made the mental calculation that caving to a potentially toothless threat of this cease-and-desist would in fact make her less happy. She wanted to tell the truth—and legal fees, court appearances, or even losing a case did not daunt her anymore. She would figure it out.

Another woman who I am working with, a military spouse, has a story about years of domestic violence in her former marriage. It’s a long and messy and troubling story, but let’s just say that he froze her out of bank accounts and that her past precarious mental health, fueled by the domestic violence, made it easier for him weaponize the court system and say “see, she’s crazy.” A family court placed her on a gag order, but she wants to tell her story. She said to me at the end of a call this week that “a couple of months in jail could even feel like self-care.”

I know this sounds crazy. But yet another woman I spoke with this week, lawyer and entrepreneur Amy Nelson, has shared her full story about Amazon frivolously accusing her husband of fraud, but her family not backing down in the face of his jail-time (charges have since been dropped). The FBI and Department of Justice pressured him to plead guilty and the feds froze all of their bank accounts, but Amy and her husband and four daughters fought for five years to get the charges dropped. This meant she had to be incredibly public about the story, doubling down on their innocence in the face of Jeff Bezos and government agencies threatening them (check out Amy’s TikTok here for the ins and outs—she credits TikTok and her citizen journalism work in part with saving their lives, Amazon’s tentacles are vast in the media).

Speaking of TikTok, its mind-reading algorithm brought me to an interview with singer Chappell Roan the other day that resonates completely with this theme. CBS interviewer Gayle King asks Chappell Roan what gives her the confidence that so many young women aspire to. She literally says: “walk away” energy—the idea that at any moment, she can walk away from things that are not serving her. She’s had a lot of money and also no money, fame and also no fame. The ability to signal to people that you can leave situations that are not serving you is a wild psychological power because *everyone* expects you to succumb to your fear, to the idea that you could only ever level up in life and that not sticking with various forms of conventional safety means ruin.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it is worth watching the Martha Stewart documentary, where we see her trajectory from model to stockbroker and self-made billionaire-entrepreneur to felon. As we all know Martha goes to jail for several months for insider training—but I found her return to life post-jail to be even more fascinating than her initial career. When asked about jail, she tells stories of gardening with her fellow inmates and knitting ponchos, which honestly doesn’t sound all that unpleasant. And now she seems to have a genuinely enjoyable time in her late age with Snoop Dogg on their talk show, posting “thirst traps” on Instagram.

I don’t deny that this “walk away” path of risk tolerance is not for everyone. And of course there are ways in which this theory could go terribly wrong, that it could backfire. We are all wired in different ways, for different reasons informed by our lived experiences and brain wiring—and we all have different life circumstances.

But sometimes I find that real joy comes in parallel with knowing what the worst case could be, and living through it. Of reaching freedom. It’s so much sweeter.