Quitter!

Grown up lessons (Instalment NO. 2)

“Describe yourself in three words.” I stare at the application question in front of me, the blinking cursor of the blank answer box keeping time for the existential time bomb that ticks away over my head. Before, I might have gone with determined, ambitious, and committed. Three words that describe a serious person with a good head on their shoulders, who doesn’t back down from a challenge. But if the last seven months since graduation have proven anything to me, it’s that I and the world are nothing like I imagined them to be.

For a long time, I felt towards myself a completely opposite optimism that I feel quite out of touch with now. I remember being a senior in high school; I took my dog on a walk after school one day, and as we crunched across the fallen fall leaves I thought to myself, “I wonder where I’ll be this time next year.” That lofty thought manifested itself into the best four years of my life to date. So, as a senior at university, I sent up the same thought-wish hoping it would bring me serendipity once again.

Instead, I have since spent my time questioning my decisions to uproot my life yet again by moving to a new country, quitting my first full time job after accepting how depressed it truly made me, and contemplating what a lifetime of unfulfilled ambition might feel like. And as I sit here and write this, I consider that these failures are completely my fault: my own inadequacy, my own submission to a victim mindset, and my own lack of grit. Not very determined, ambitious, and committed of me.

I often grope back through the fog of remorse for the reasons I had for making these decisions to bring me some comfort. Knowing how much I loved and thrived throughout university, I was eager to not let that be my peak. This meant pushing myself out of my comfort zone, gaining new skills, and fulfilling my potential. Yet when it came to the actualisation of these goals, the unforeseen hurdle of extreme isolation and the resulting mental and physical toll it took on me left me weak at the knees instead of strong of heart.

I spent months in what feels like the ‘dark period’. I wrote articles I never published that were a cry for sanity as desperate as a beggar for warmth. I spent my days off cooped up in my small apartment feeling a sense of companionship with the fruit fly that never left my kitchen. I ignored facetime calls that I panicked would reveal my bloated and disused body that I simultaneously wanted to cave into and tear away from.

It was in these passing months where I pushed and pushed, urging myself to stay strong through a period of difficulty to feel a sense of accomplishment at its end. Surely I would gain something from this sacrifice, surely the sun doesn’t shine without some rain. But when my boyfriend asked me one day what I had learnt from all my days of crying, I looked up through the tears and realised that I had created my own glass ceiling of suffering.

What had I truly gained from staying in my pain? What was noble about enabling myself to repeat patterns of discontent? I was learning nothing and I was gaining nothing by ‘being strong.’ My need to not be a quitter and to make this all mean something instead became the worst form of self harm I’ve ever engaged in, punishing myself for a prize that didn’t exist. Only through cracking the ceiling of my own bell jar could I stop circulating the same stale air that my depressed body released.

The me seven months ago would call the me now a quitter. A person who has allowed failure to become a reality. Nonetheless, the pain of glass shards scraping my arms as I cracked and crawled out of the prison of my own making never felt near as painful as the clogging of poisoned air inhaled and exhaled in the confined delusion of safety. Sometimes the weakest thing you can do is to continue to put yourself in harms way under the guise of being a champion. Sometimes the cleverest thing to do is to quit to enable yourself to be ready for more worthwhile battles.

My confidence before wasn’t certainty, it was naivety. My headstrong nature wasn’t founded in some infallible personal characteristic that brought about inevitable success, but in a privileged life that enable me to access all things within my ambition. In the harsh sunlight of the cold winter morning, I can see enough to know I know nothing for certain about the world, and likely never will.

Only now can I answer my boyfriend or complete the application with certainty. What have I learned? Who am I? I am a person who will not self sacrifice. I am determined to play a long, long game that I will survive. I am ambitious about living with intention and committed to treating life with care. Perhaps the three words to describe me are cautious, curious, and full of care. Or maybe they are reflective, tenacious, and self-forgiving. All are things I have learned can be braver than persevering.