26 May 2026
This month Ruth writes about the “almosts” and how hard it can be to leave them behind.
How do you know when you are ready to leave behind something you love?
A few weeks ago, I resigned from the job that has shaped the last decade of my life, a sentence which still feels surreal to even write down, let alone say aloud. For the last ten years, work has been the great love of my life. I arrived in London in my twenties with ambition, energy and, looking back now, an almost adorable willingness to throw myself wholeheartedly into difficult things.
Over the years that instinct rewarded me in countless ways. I became part of a company that shaped my identity in ways I am only beginning to understand now that I am leaving it.
I spent a decade surrounded by the kind of closeness that can only develop in high-pressure workplaces, where people survive impossible periods together and emerge bonded by shared exhaustion and adrenaline.
Thinking back, entire eras of my life now seem to have happened against a backdrop of office coffees, train platforms, late-night taxis and conversations that veered wildly between professionalism and confession.
Somewhere inside that same world, another, more intimate relationship unfolded too, so present that I struggle now to separate the two in my mind. At the centre of it was a beautiful, complicated man whose appeal seemed strangely invisible to others, but was completely impossible for me to ignore.
For a while, it made me happy. It existed outside the usual structures people use to define relationships and therefore retained a certain glamour to me; lots of chemistry, anticipation and emotional intensity. It swayed between closeness and independence. It belonged to a chapter of my life built around movement and freedom. It was made up of long lunches that became evenings, walking for hours through London streets sharing childhood stories and late nights cooking inedible food in my tiny kitchen.
There is something deeply seductive about relationships that exist slightly outside reality. The absence of domestic routine allows each encounter to remain heightened, protected from the practicalities that can flatten even the happiest love stories over time. For years, I believed this arrangement suited me better than conventional romance ever could. I liked the autonomy of it, the mystery, the sense that my emotional life remained open-ended in a very chic, dare I say, European kind of way. It mirrored the bright, unpredictable rhythm of my thirties.
A realisation that surprised me most over the past year is that neither my job nor this relationship had become particularly unhappy. Both still contained beauty and meaning. Yet gradually, I began to sense the edges of both arrangements pressing against the person I was becoming.
Both had started to feel emotionally insufficient. When talking with friends, I find that it’s surprisingly difficult to explain this feeling, because it contains so little bitterness. I look back on both experiences with real tenderness. My career gave me confidence, purpose and some of the deepest friendships of my adult life. The relationship brought softness, intimacy and warmth.
Somewhere along the way though, my definition of fulfilment shifted. I realised I was no longer excited by building a future around almosts, however compelling those almosts might be. I realised I wanted something more complete.
And that was why the parallel between my work life and my personal life became impossible to ignore. There is a very specific kind of sadness attached to recognising that something can be both meaningful and no longer right for you. Formative experiences of your adult life are complicated in that way. Sometimes the balance between what you give and what you receive begins to feel uneven. Both situations sustained me for years but eventually left me with the sense that I had outgrown the particular version of them being offered to me.
That, I think, is one of the real gifts of your thirties. They teach you what kind of life actually fits you. Mine has been vivid, intense and enormous fun. It wasn’t perfect – nothing ever is – and I’ve made many mistakes, but I’ve built a life so full of all the things that are important to me. And now, as my thirties draw to a close, I’m starting to consider what surroundings, relationships and definitions of success will allow me to feel most like myself in the next decade.
I suspect most of us have our own version of an almost; a relationship, a career, a version of ourselves that suited us perfectly for a particular moment in time, until one day we realised that it just… didn’t. It’s OK for something wonderful to no longer be enough.
I don’t look back on the almosts with sadness. I look back on them as evidence of a life fully lived. They carried me through my thirties brilliantly. Now, standing at the edge of this next chapter – a new role, a slightly wiser version of myself and, hopefully, a little more emotional clarity – I find myself genuinely excited by the future. It feels even bigger than the past. Because if that was my life before forty, with all its wonderfully messy detours, then I cannot wait to see what the next decade brings.
Of course, there is every chance all of this wisdom and personal growth proves surprisingly fragile the moment a certain chaotic European man reappears in my life…
