On Escaping, Returning and the Courage to Become Yourself
Every culture has its preferred way of naming the moment we want out.
Last week, I learnt about a French metaphor:
“Je vais tout quitter pour aller élever des chèvres dans le Larzac.”
I’ll just drop everything and go raise goats in the Larzac.
It sounds like a joke, but jokes are often the first safe place we allow the truth to appear. And this one reveals a longing many mid-career professionals know all too well: the longing to step out of a life that fits on paper but has stopped fitting the person who lives it.
The Larzac plateau, is apparently known for its vast horizon and stubborn winds, and has long been a symbol of choosing one’s own path. A place where people have gone to resist, to rethink, to reclaim their autonomy. When someone invokes it now, they aren’t fantasising about livestock. They’re imagining a life with less noise and more meaning. A life where they can hear themselves again.
Behind the quip lies a quiet ache:
I can’t keep going like this.
I don’t know who I’m becoming.
And I don’t know where to go to find out.
That ache is not a crisis. It is a sign of life.
We tend to treat mid-career turbulence as something to be fixed; a disruption to be managed so we can return to the familiar path with minimal delay. But turbulence often signals that we have outgrown the very identity that built our success. We feel the urge to flee not because we are fragile, but because we are evolving. And evolution rarely happens indoors.
This is why people fantasise about remote hillsides and solitary refuges. The Larzac becomes a metaphor for the inner wilderness we enter when the old story falters and a new one has not yet taken shape. It is a place, real or imagined, where competence doesn’t shield us, ambition doesn’t rush us, and we are allowed to wonder who we might be if we stopped trying to be who we were.
Sabbaticals, career-breaks, pauses, wandering years: we often treat them as indulgences, but they are, in fact, thresholds. They are the moments when our carefully built identity loosens enough for something else to breathe.
Herminia Ibarra calls this the work of “becoming by experimenting.” We don’t discover our next self by thinking harder about the one we already know. We discover it by trying on different versions of ourselves until one feels true. That is the deeper wisdom buried inside the Larzac fantasy.
It invites us not to abandon our life but to loosen our grip on it. To make room for curiosity, for detours, for the kind of experiments that don’t promise certainty but do promise discovery.
Most people never move to a plateau. But many need a season that resembles it: a stretch of life where they are free from the expectations that once defined them, long enough to notice the ones that might define them next. And that season demands courage.
Not the heroic, decisive courage of grand gestures. The quieter kind. The courage to sit with unease instead of numbing it. To ask better questions instead of rushing to answers. To venture beyond the identity that once felt like home and walk toward one that doesn’t yet have a name.
If the thought of raising goats in the Larzac has ever crossed your mind - even playfully - consider what it is trying to tell you. It may not be pointing to a place. It may be pointing to a part of you that is asking to be met. Mid-career transitions are not departures from our path. They are deep encounters with ourselves.
We think we are escaping, but what we are really doing is returning to the person we are becoming, the one who has been waiting for us to catch up. And so, the Larzac reminds us of something essential: To lead well, to live fully, to grow honestly, we must sometimes step into a wilderness of our own making. Not to disappear, but to reappear. Not to lose ourselves, but to find the courage to become more truly who we already are.