When he asked me to marry him, it seemed like the easiest yes. A yes I had wanted to say for months. I fell in love hard and fast. I had let myself dream about a future, and now that future was unfolding in front of me.

No relationship is perfect. We grow and evolve. The details don’t matter, but there were cracks. I had said yes to marriage, to a happily ever after, to a life commitment, and now I wasn’t so sure.

The wedding had been postponed because of the pandemic, so we were not legally joined. But we had a life together, a house, two dogs, and I was a stepmom to his son.

I couldn’t think about leaving. I was afraid, and too proud to admit things were not going to plan.

Suddenly, on a random Friday afternoon, we admitted that the cracks had become too big. We had to decide whether to get help to fix them or walk away. I barely slept that night.

It had been my plan all week to do a cold swim in a tidal pool that Saturday morning. I quietly set off. As I reached the beach the sun was just starting to rise over the wall of the tidal pool.

I was shivering with emotion as I walked into the cold water. When I’d waded out to about waist level, I crouched down in the water, letting the cold numb me as I cried.

A man stood a few metres away from me, arms outstretched as he prayed and sang to his higher power. This only added to the feeling that I was having a deeply spiritual moment.

I left the cold water. I pulled on my hoodie and wrapped my towel around my still-wet body. I sat down and stared into the sun. From deep within, I felt the answer. “You need to leave.”

I didn’t feel that I was changing my yes to a no. Rather, I was saying yes to something new. Yes, to a very different life and adventure.

In the years since that sunrise epiphany, I’ve had to make a lot of decisions. Many of the small decisions we make seem insignificant but can have very big repercussions.

A few weeks after that breakup, I said yes to attending a ballet workshop. I was 38 and had never attended a ballet class before. I needed to try something new.

That small yes changed the course of my life. Ballet has given me a level of confidence that I could never have imagined.

After hearing about my breakup, a woman I hardly knew reached out. I said yes to meeting her for coffee, and now she’s one of my dearest friends.

Recently, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by bigger decisions about my future. I know that no matter what you believe in—a higher power, fate, or science—things often don’t go according to plan. We can’t control everything that happens in life.

This can be a good thing, sometimes. Being forced to change a yes to a no, or choosing this yes over another yes, allows us to change direction when we most need to.