Time & Perspective Quote by Darren L. Johnson

Letting go gets marketed as a clean, heroic exit. Darren L. Johnson complicates that fantasy by insisting the real work is diagnostic: knowing when to endure and when to leave. The line is built around a quiet pivot from emotion to judgment. It doesn’t romanticize detachment; it frames release as a skill of timing.

The specific intent is practical, almost therapeutic. “Recognizing” makes agency the centerpiece, not the breakup, resignation, or severed bond. Johnson positions staying as an active choice rather than a failure of courage, which pushes back on a self-help culture that treats persistence as denial and departure as growth. The quote gives equal moral weight to both options. That balance is the tell: it’s aimed at people who are stuck not because they don’t know what they want, but because both choices carry consequences.

Subtext: you can’t “let go” without telling the truth about the situation you’re in. Sometimes the attachment isn’t to a person or job so much as to an identity (the loyal partner, the hard worker, the fixer) that makes leaving feel like betrayal. Sometimes staying is the avoidance. Johnson’s line smuggles in a standard for clarity: if you can’t name what would have to change for staying to be healthy, you’re not choosing; you’re drifting.

Contextually it reads like guidance shaped by relationship and career crossroads, where the hardest part isn’t the goodbye but the permission slip. It works because it refuses the dramatic binary and replaces it with something harsher and more useful: discernment.