Sor Juana stayed. I left. We both paid the price of refusing to live inside the approved version of ourselves, but we paid in different currencies.
I think about the question of staying versus leaving — not as a general principle but as a specific question that the examined life eventually puts to you. Not every examined life requires departure. But some do. And the ones that require it can be recognized by a specific kind of suffering: the suffering of being faithful to something external at the cost of something interior that will not be suppressed.
I am not recommending abandoning your obligations. I am asking you to examine which of your obligations are genuinely yours and which are arrangements you accepted before you knew yourself well enough to choose.
There is a version of staying that is courageous and true — Sor Juana's staying, which produced extraordinary work under extraordinary constraint. And there is a version of staying that is a slow diminishment, a gradual erasure of the self that could not be spoken aloud.
Only you can tell the difference. But the examined life insists that you tell it — honestly, not conveniently.
What would you choose if the choice were only between what is true and what is approved?