The Strength of Walking Away Without Needing the Last Word

There is a most annoying satisfaction to having the last word. There is always a little piece of you hoping for it in any conversation that has veered off course, something that will either prove cleverly devastating or make the other person finally see reason in that hour long argument. And then you can walk away. Except, of course, they answer.

Now you must answer their answer, because you simply can't let that be the last word. Before you know it, that conversation that was supposed to be ended twenty minutes ago now has an additional twenty minutes appended to it.
I have done it. I imagine most people have.

The interesting thing about wanting the last word is it generally rarely has to do with the words at all. It's about the feeling that you want to leave on a high note, that the other person knows you weren't misunderstood. It's that they recognise they hurt you, lied about you, underestimated you or simply got the whole situation wrong. Sometimes you want an apology, sometimes a guilty conscience. Sometimes, if we're being brutally honest, you want to say something that sticks in their head for the rest of their lives.

There isn't anything noble about that last point, but it's human.

The problem is that people do not always give you the ending you want. They don't all of a sudden become reasonable because you've reached your last tether. They might keep arguing. Dismiss what you're saying. Worse still, walk away thinking they were right all along. And now you're expected to live with that.

Walking away can be difficult when you still have something to say.
I think that is why we sometimes misunderstand leaving things alone. It's not always an enlightened state. You don't always walk away feeling the peace, calm and detachment of someone who has moved on. Sometimes, you're bloody furious. Sometimes, you're halfway home when you think of three more things you wished you'd said. Sometimes you know exactly how you could hurt the other person and have to make a conscious effort not to.

That still counts as walking away.

In fact, I think that is when it matters most.
Anyone can leave a conversation when they no longer care about it. The difficult part is leaving when you care quite a lot, but have understood that continuing is not going to bring anything useful. You've explained yourself, they've explained themselves. Perhaps neither explanation was particularly satisfying. Another hour won't magically bring understanding.

At some point, another sentence is just going to be another sentence. Not everything becomes clear because you keep talking.

Sometimes you can reach those strange dead ends in conversations where you can all feel it. Where it begins to feel like the same things are being said, just in slightly different words. Where no one listens properly anymore, because they're all prepping their response. Where the issue has been buried under tones, accusations, old grievances and things that probably shouldn't have been said in the first place. You could keep going.

That is the tricky part. You can always keep going.

There is almost always another accusation to be had if you look hard enough. Another old mistake you could dredge up. Another weakness that you know about because they were kind enough to tell you. Arguments give people plenty of opportunity to become cruel and convince themselves that being cruel was warranted because they were angry.

Sometimes, strength is simply in knowing you could make things worse and not doing so. Some things need to be confronted, I agree, but confrontation needs an end as well.

You need to be able to recognize when you've said what needed to be said. What comes after that is not always entirely up to you. The other person may understand you tomorrow, in ten years from now, or never. They may tell a completely different story to every person they meet. They may make you the villain because it's the version of the story that suits them. It can be so tempting to chase them into their version of the story, and correct them.

But how far are you willing to follow?

That is a question that I've recently found myself far more interested in than who was right in the first place. Because there are people you could explain yourself to forever. Every explanation produces another objection. Every answer requires another answer, until you eventually find yourself trying to prove your character to someone who has already decided what you are.

You can't explain yourself to someone who has decided to misunderstand you.

At that point, leaving is not an admission of guilt. Nor is it necessarily forgiveness. You can walk away from somebody and know that what they did was wrong. You can stop replying without suddenly agreeing with everything they said. Silence doesn't rewrite what happened.

It simply means you're no longer a part of it.

There is something rather powerful about that, once you get used to it. You're able to see that not everything you hear about you needs to be maintained. Someone can dislike you. Someone can think you're arrogant, selfish, foolish, difficult or outright wrong. You are allowed to examine what they have said, decide if any of it is useful, and continue on with your life. You don't need to launch into a public relations campaign every time that someone misunderstands something you've said.

And perhaps that is where needing the last word becomes exhausting. You're no longer simply trying to communicate, you're trying to control them over what they think after the conversation has ended. Good luck with that.

People believe weird things. They remember events differently. They tell them in ways that make most sense in their own heads. Sometimes they will eventually realise that they were unfair to you. Sometimes they won't. If your peace depends on everyone reaching the correct conclusion about you, you're going to spend a lot of your life waiting.

There are also times when walking away protects you from yourself. Anger makes certain sentences far more rewarding for about thirty seconds before they stick out in the world, and you can't drag them back because you've calmed down.
I've seen relationships survive disagreements and then collapse because of the things that were said trying to win them.

Knowing when to stop matters.

Not because you're weak, and not because the other person deserves your silence. Sometimes, it's simply because you know yourself well enough to know that another ten minutes is just not going to bring out your finest hour.

There is strength in walking away before anger chooses your words for you.

Walking away won't always feel satisfying, that's probably worth saying. You may walk away with your heart racing, still rehearsing arguments in your head. You may spend the night wondering if you should send one last message. But there was no apology, and nobody admitted anything. You didn't get to say that magnificent final sentence you had constructed in your brain. Life continues regardless.

Perhaps that's the thing we struggle with most. We want endings that explain themselves. We want the record to be corrected before the doors shut.
Sometimes, the doors just shut. And sometimes, strength is knowing you could say more, and deciding you've said enough.