Living in the Doorway

Living in the Doorway

On letting go, and why it rarely looks like a goodbye

Sara Kuburic

Oct 29, 2026

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I think most of us imagine letting go as a moment, like a final conversation or the night we finally delete their number. But it almost never happens that way. More often, it looks like someone slowly realizing that they’ve been waiting for so long that the waiting itself has become a place they live.

Maybe you know this place. You kept your phone face up, just in case. You left your calendar open, because what if they reached out and you weren’t free? You told yourself you were being patient or loyal, and maybe you were, at first.

But weeks turned into months, and somewhere along the way, without ever really deciding to, you stopped living in your life and started living in the doorway. Not in, not out, just waiting.

I’ve come to think of the doorway as one of the most exhausting places a person can stand, because it asks nothing of us and everything at the same time. We don’t have to grieve, since we don’t believe it’s technically over, and we don’t have to rebuild, since they might still come back. We get to stay suspended between what was and what could be, which can feel strangely safe.

What I wish more people talked about is how much holding on can feel like love. It can feel like loyalty, or like proof that what we had really mattered. There’s often a quiet fear underneath it, something like: if I let go, maybe it didn’t mean as much as I thought it did, and maybe I didn’t mean as much either. I understand that fear, but I want to gently say that staying in the doorway isn’t the same thing as honoring a relationship. Very often, it just becomes a way of abandoning ourselves.

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In existential therapy, we talk a lot about freedom and responsibility, and the uncomfortable truth that we are always choosing, even when it feels like we’re only waiting. Standing in the doorway is a choice. It shapes who we let close and what we allow ourselves to want. Every day we stay there, we’re deciding that someone else’s return matters more than our own presence in our life. I know that’s hard to hear, but I actually find it hopeful, because if we’re choosing, it means we can choose differently.

For a lot of the people I work with, the shift starts when they notice how cold the house has gotten, how small their world became so it could fit around someone’s absence. And then they do the hardest, quietest thing, which is to close the door.

It’s not about slamming it shut with anger or regret. It’s not about convincing themselves they’ve stopped caring. It’s just about allowing themselves to live their life again.

What surprises people is that, usually, nothing dramatic happens afterward. There’s no sudden epiphany and no closure neatly handed to you by the person who left. The room just slowly starts to get warm again.

Letting go is choosing to stop living in the doorway. It’s walking back into your own life and asking yourself what you want now, who you are when you aren’t waiting, and what it might feel like to be fully here.

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