Lessons from Quitting
Growing up, there was a lot of pressure on success and success meant without question to finish what I started. I remember I was in OM (Odyssey of the Mind) in 5-8 grade and it was the best thing about my life. It gave me this tight social group of the coolest people in the school. Instead of just being another kid from off colored house in the Fairmount neighborhood, I began to think of myself as somebody who mattered. It didn't really change anything – but it changed everything to have those other OM kids as a community for me. One of the first major dramatic things that ever happened to me was actually early in 9th grade when I enrolled to be in OM again, but I found that the team was not going to be work with me. I forget why I was conflicted about having joined the team. Maybe I really just wanted to focus on grades, or there was a social conflict. I remember talking with my big brother/nephew Jeremiah who told me it was ok to quit. Yeah, that is when I became not a hero, but a character who would fall before I rose, and fall many times, a dynamic character, someone who would many times feel broken, and maybe never stop feeling hurt – but let me tell you how the pain changed me for the better and what I'm going to do with it.
Yeah, I said I was never a quitter, but I look down and found myself grown, those rules had changed completely. Now I can name tons of things I quit. In fact, I know this might be immoral that I have a college degree, but I quit college, well 5 or so colleges, more times than I know how to count.
Where did I quit the second time. The first time was OM, in 9th grade. Now I clearly have never thought of this before.
Ah, yes. That was it. The relationship that shaped my life between 7th and 8th grades. My best friend got into the alcohol cabinet. It was actually around the time of Mardi Gras when I was in the 9th grade, so I guess we had the right idea about something. If I had been stronger then I could have kept her from going to rehab. I told myself that. But I don't know if I could have. I am not a superhero and I had to take care of myself back then. I never drank or did drugs but the stresses of high school social life were enough to make me break down most days. How could I have been a good enough friend for her? I don't know, but about a year later, I cut ties so that I could survive high school. She was in a rehab by then. So in a sense, I quit something with her.
11th grade and 12th grade were a supreme focus on academic achievement. You might get the sense of it with my adoration of Odyssey of the Mind but I'm pretty geeky, and when I was in those grades, especially my last grade of high school, I was so focused on Calculus and English class, I could not worry about much. I didn't have many friends in 11th grade I guess. But the preps started being nice to me in 12th, and too late afterwards, I realized preps are just kids with lucky parents or just high achieving kids like me. I also was very artistic. I made paintings my senior year that pulled beauty out of my heart in a way I didn't know it existed.
When I graduated high school, I forget how this happened entirely, but my father got me a job through a friend of his who worked at the DC Environmental Protection Agency Office. The month before starting, I promptly was bit by a deer tick, I contracted Lyme Disease, developed a terrible bulls eye rash on my back, became chronically exhausted and fatigued over night, threw up with the fever that was my first main symptom. I was treated with extended antibiotics, but would not be working for the EPA. It was my second job. I had worked a great job as a lifeguard in the YMCA before that. But there is something larger than life about a 17 year old getting an internship with the EPA. There never was a question of if I would go to work anyway. I am supremely hardworking but I was not able to do that. I was very sick. It became neurologically implicated. It made me very prone to mood/thinking disorders. I would eventually develop bipolar or schizo affective disorder.
Summer ended.
At the end of my first week at Earlham College I ended up in a psych ward of a hospital in Indiana.
Somewhere in the spinning panic of severe mental illness, that time I quit with not much planning, so that doesn't really count as a choice. Hospitals, medication to keep my moods in balance, medication to keep me thinking rational thought, medication for when I talked and it didn't make sense, medication to make me sleep, medication to wipe me out when I could not follow the rules of the hospital.
Then in Guilford College, I tried again to get a degree, and became so depressed I would not leave my room, so I quit and withdrew from College. I think by then it already was somehow instinct. 9Th grade OM might have been the first quitting. The EPA job might have been the 2nd quitting. But by the time I quit Guildford, it came to me easy. I was already by then such an old hand at quitting. Not that I wasn't terrified and worried and sad and miserable. I was, but I wasn't worried that if I didn't plow through the hard stuff I would never get to the good times. No, that was a lesson I learned and sometimes forget. I did not know that yet.
The thing about quitting is, I am entirely glad that Jeremiah taught me the quitter's response. When he gave me permission to quit, maybe it was because he was guilty about something. And maybe it was because he saw in me that I was going to mess up or get angry or break something or do something horrible with that emotion that I was experiencing then. He gave me a way to find peace. Quitting was that way. Quitting helped me be a person who has talked about killing myself about two times for dramatic purposes. But I never have felt like killing myself. I never have wanted to end my life, and I have a mental illness where statistics are staggering. So another way of putting that is that quitting gave me a coping mechanism. When the going gets tough, I have had a way out of the going, by very simply “going”. So I know that by virtue of instinct I have an exit plan and a coping mechanism that means I will survive. That is a good start. Not that I always know when to quit, but at least I am trying.
I have spoken of about 4 years of quitting, maybe 5? But the thing is, I have quit and struggled for about 15 years give or take since that fateful time when I permitted this recourse in high school. What I am finding is that I have a well of doubt that follows me. Part of it might even be due to the people who love and support me the most who have watched me misstep and mess up and want me to just quit trying so many new things, to find one or two things I do well, and to stay in one place and strengthen where I am. Why should they bring me doubt? When I communicate with family members I usually experience their doubt about things I am excited about doing. Let me admit I get excited about some new idea, a new place, a new way to my hopes and dreams every day. It exhausts my family to have me talk about these plans. This is both the nature of my mental illness, who I am, and the root of much of my suffering. It puts me in a quizzical instable realm with the ones who I love, even while I may be visibly swimming in successes, offers, and doing well. The thing is, the reason I am seeking opportunities every day is because I missed so many possibilities in my life that were just at the tip of my fingers, I got a feel for success, I got a taste of what it feels like to have good news to share at the one party I go to every year, I really put a lot of personal neediness in how my family talked about my accomplishments at Thanksgiving. So when things didn't go the ways that I hoped and dreamed, I felt like it was me who was flushed down the toilet, not my hopes.
I don't know why my nature has involves such a persistent trying. I have never quit trying, and I think that is really wonderful. But I think I should – at the same time – quit trying things that hurt me, I should quit trying things that waste resources, I should quit trying things that I am not even going to do in the first place.
These are the unflattering details of one mentally ill person's life. They do not represent all the people with extreme disabling problems. May I live to be so brave as some of those people.
Anyway, I began feeling doubt is ruling my life. I told my mother in the most worried, but also spiteful of ways. I said my self doubt was because my family never believed in me. I said my missed opportunities were because no one ever supported me.
The truth, though, is that was really the wrong way of looking at the facts of life. Overall, I have always claimed my missteps or at least I have learned to admit when I was wrong. For example, I have retraced to my mother and given her a hug, said she is not to blame, made her laugh again.
At my alma mater, I had a friend named Melanie.
Parts of my human interactions followed suit in Berea, as relationships repeat in the same dynamics often, and I am not saying my relationship with Melanie was perfect or that she is a superhuman Goddess. But Melanie was different. Her voice was measured. She thought about her words and her actions. And maybe where I was thinking I wanted to watch TV and eat sugar all day and still make A's. She was thinking it would be nice if she could act as a child, but she was raising a child. So in a way Melanie was leagues ahead of the non-parent students just by virtue of being a responsible mother.
Honestly, that is a marginal, simplified explanation of Melanie. She was a Goddess. I have trouble explaining the true concept of Melanie, because of how significant she was of a person. I was thinking I could wait until tomorrow to live my life where Melanie was thinking she had this little teeny bopper already to serve as a role model for.
I don't know why Melanie took me as a friend. But once I was in, I was in. She included me at all costs. She had diners at her house, sometimes weekly, and she invited me over, and we tried to cook cool things, like sushi or the lobster experiment. So what can I learn from Melanie? To live as if my child is here with me because even if I don't have a child, I need to step up and own my daily life?
One of the last conversations I had (face to face) with Melanie answered the question of what I can learn from her. She told me what she would do if she was in my shoes. She reminded me of the great amount of liberty I have in being single, in not having a child, in having no serious commitments I must do. But she cautioned me. She said that she has seen me cast about down different paths, and she suggested that I make a plan and stick to it. There was no suggestion as to what that plan might be, and that is why she was such a good person to talk to. I took her advice and literally saved it in a file labeled Melanie. Part of it you read today.
But I never knew the plan. What is the goal in my life? Who am I? It is so easy for me to wonder. I wake up in the morning and stumble into a job offer in my inbox from where I applied the night before. Is that the direction I want to take next? Is stumbling from one offer to the next the way forward for my life, my whole life?
Some plans might have very specific agendas. But as someone with a disability, one of my main goals on my do not list is getting spontaneous new jobs and applying to offers that might throw off my balance. So I made a to do list that serves my purposes. But I have to keep to my not to do list to, or all hell breaks loose.
I am not like this magical tree that grows and grows until it reaches the height of its goal.
I am a tire that inflates and deflates. It reaches the heights, then all the air drains out the next minute. I am hard to keep track of sometimes because of that.