When to Quit…

The act of quitting conjures up images of failure and defeat, but I’ve come to the realization that sometimes not quitting can be the more pusillanimous decision.

There are many opportunities in our lives to abandon things; music lessons that have grown old, sports activities, an unsatisfactory job that doesn’t challenge us. I have had all of these opportunities (and more) and have experienced quitting and not-quitting.

The Obligatory Children’s Music Lessons

I started taking piano lessons when I was in grade five even though my family didn’t own a piano. We arranged with my grade five teacher that I would stay in for both morning and afternoon recess each day and practice on the piano in the classroom. This earned me the distinction of “Teacher’s Pet Extraordinaire” even though I explained that I was practicing piano during that time (or supposed to be – I often gazed out the 2^nd storey window and watched the other kids playing outside because I quickly learned that practicing the piano was really not all that fun), not helping the teacher clean chalkboards or collate geography handouts. My family finally broke down and purchased an apartment piano when I moved to a new school for grade seven and there were no recesses or pianos to be readily found. I continued to struggle with balancing time for practice (Did I mention I really hated practicing?) with time for hanging out with friends in High School. When we moved to a small town and piano teachers were scarce my mother finally relented and let me quit. A part of me wishes I’d had the perseverance to hang in there, but I just didn’t have it in me.

Mandatory Phys-Ed

In high school you were required to take phys-ed in grades 9 and 10. After that it became an elective. Once it was optional I dropped it like a hot potato. I’d never been overly athletic as a teenager, was always picked last for sports teams (which is why I have never belonged to a sports team since) and I found that physical activity always hurt. (in hindsight it was probably because I was out of shape and every time we were required to do something for gym class, like cross-country running, I would tackle it gung-ho and then pay the price the next day.) So I quit gym.

Two jobs – Two very different stories

Job One

I had just graduated from University with a Bachelor of Arts (the most useful of all degrees /s) and had spent my summer working in the bush on a tree plant earning oodles of money to pay off my student loans. Once summer was over I began the search for a permanent job with which to showcase my talents. A small town newspaper offered me a job as reporter. Although I had no journalism experience aside from being a correspondent for a year or two with a slightly larger but more removed paper, I decided to take the job. After the first week I realized that reporting wasn’t in my blood. I lacked the straightforwardness and outgoing personality one needs to sniff out and attack the stories making the news, especially in such a thriving metropolis like Sioux Lookout Ontario. During my five seemingly endless tortuous months there a friend of mine called me numerous times telling me he was planning a trip to Europe the following spring and that he’d love for me to come along. I repeatedly refused, citing that I should give this job a fair shot, knowing in my heart that I already had, yet still unable to admit failure and quit my only source of income. Christmas came and my parents could see my joylessness. They urged me to quit, telling me that this opportunity to travel to Europe may never come again, and offered to lend me the money for the trip. After mulling this over for 100,000^th of a sec I finally agreed, and returned to work after my long weekend off to give my two weeks’ notice.

I have never once regretted this decision. Quitting that job was the best decision I could have made. I had an amazing five weeks in Europe and returned to find a 6-month contract job opening up in the Forestry department of the local paper mill which I applied for and got.

Job Two

After graduating from college years later (My ‘useful’ BA had outlived its usefulness) I landed a job with a national company, programming applications in their shipping and payables department. It was the best paying job I’d ever had, and my most despised. It was not despisable enough however to persuade me to leave the salary and benefits and I stuck with the job, eventually being pigeonholed into a support area that was mundane and boring and provided me with no challenges whatsoever. I started a job search with the hope that I could find something more to my liking along similar pay scales. Since nothing came up, as much as I longed to, I couldn’t just up and quit without a safety net, especially since I had recently separated from my husband and was supporting myself and my two children half time. Just when I began to settle into a boring groove, the company was taken over and 70% of the employees were to be let go at varying times over the next 12 months. My time was in six months. And the job I wanted to quit, but couldn’t, didn’t exist anymore and I had to move on. (As with Job One, this was the best thing that could have happened to me as I had four months of severance to burn through while I took my time looking for another job, while spending quality time volunteering at my children’s school and spending much of my free time hanging out with them. I landed my current job after those four months and have been very happy both with the job itself and the pay).

Quitting Friends

“Friendships are a tangled web from which escape can be very tricky.” DNTO’s Sook-Yin Lee said during a podcast I listened to recently. I had to whole-heartedly agree. It is much harder to break up with a friend than it is to break-up with a boyfriend. But I have found myself on both sides of the quit-zone. Some friendships simply outlive their usefulness. In this case both parties just eventually mutually drift apart. This is by far the easiest, and the one that is least likely to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Other “break-ups” are not so easy. How do you tell someone who has been your friend for years that you don’t want to be their friend anymore without sounding like you are in Grade Two? There is no diplomatic way of quitting a friendship without it sounding like a personal affront. When it gets difficult to put energy into a friendship, it’s time to give it up. When it’s one-sided it’s time to give it up. When your interests or values or outlooks on life change, it’s time to give it up. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been angry when someone decides that I’m not important enough to remain in their close circle of friends, but I get over it. I am an adult, and when I sit back and honestly think about it, I can usually see why the friendship failed and understand the reasons for dissolving it. I have also been on the receiving end of the wrath, and I think it hurts even more when you cause that kind of hurt to another person. So I’ll say it again, “There is no easy way to quit a friendship.” All I can hope is that others sit back like I did and try to understand the motivation behind the decision. A good friend of mine quoted the poem A Reason, a Season or a Lifetime, in her blog back in April. It seemed to fit here since it deals with friendships gracefully ending or moving on. It is succinct and the points it makes would be well taken by anyone who wants to be a friend.

Quitting, for me, has never been an entirely negative experience. I’ve always been able to look on the bright side and find good in decisions I’ve made. I’ve stayed true to more things than I’ve quit. I’ve become an athlete, something that I would never have believed way back in high school. I’ve developed and nurtured many wonderful and fulfilling friendships over the years. So in a sense, I’m not a quitter, but I know when to quit.

Living up to Expectations

I think everyone has felt at one point or another in their lifetimes that they had to live up to someone else’s expectations.

In the beginning it’s your parents. We feel the continual need to please and be praised when we are younger. It starts early when you are a child. The first time you smile or laugh or stand or begin to walk you get an exciting reaction from your parents. They smile, they laugh, they cheer and they encourage you and you decide that you like that. So you keep doing these things to elicit that response from them again. (This is what makes potty training easy for parents of eager-to-please children) Each time you get that desired reaction you know that you have done something worthy in their eyes and it makes you feel good. And each time you don’t, the look of disappointment you see hurts you and you are motivated to change, to redeem yourself – after all, they are your parents, the two most important people in your life.

Then you leave them and go to school, and your teachers begin to take the place of your parents and you start trying to please your teachers by doing well on tests, in sports, volunteering in the classroom. In Grade Six I was the ultimate teacher’s pet. I thought the world of my teacher (back then and still to this day), and when he showed approval for the things I did around the class it made me feel special. All for that smile, the validation that I was doing something right and something valuable in his eyes. (I admit I was a keener back then.)

As you get older, friends become your important circle. Peer pressure emerges and suddenly you are doing things that you may not feel comfortable doing, but you do them because you don’t want to lose the respect (or what you perceive to be respect) of your friends, again, trying to live up to expectations. On and on this goes throughout your life, and you start to wonder why you are living your life for other people instead of yourself. There was one time back in high school when I had two close girlfriends. All three of us were ‘dating’ boys and had all ended up at one of the friends houses when parents were out. The other two friends disappeared into bedrooms leaving me and my boyfriend alone in the living room. I could tell that he wanted me to go into the other empty bedroom with him. A part of me inside screamed “No!,” but I went along because I didn’t want my friends to think me a prude or a tease. We were the last to emerge from the bedroom later and although nothing happened - other than some innocent making out - my friends smiled knowingly at me. I suppose at the time I figured that being thought a tease was much worse than being thought easy.

There seems to be a double standard with friends that some people seem to expect more from some friends than others. In high school’s “the cool group” many things were completely forgiven depending on who it was. Not ever being in “the cool group” I remember being frowned upon for insignificant things, and I got to the point where I second-guessed everything I did. Even as adults those cool-groups persist, and I am still not one of them. (See ‘On the Periphery’).

As humans we crave acceptance. We want to be loved and appreciated. No one likes to disappoint. I’ve always been super-sensitive to what other people think of me. My aim had always been to please other people. To do things that I knew would be expected of me. It ended up being my curse, and I am trying to rid myself of it. I have realized that I cannot please everyone, and live up to everyone else’s expectations. Much of my married life was spent doing that, and I ended up harboring a lot of resentment. It is much more difficult when it comes from those who are closest to you. I think you try harder and harder to please them. I also think they begin to withhold certain things because they see they have the upper-hand. I have seen inklings of this in my children, and there were nights I spent talking to them for hours, reassuring them that they didn’t need to do something because they thought I wanted them to do it. But they should do it because they wanted to. I won’t have them fall into the same pattern.

In the process of shedding this curse, I have been able to open up my circle. I have discovered a new world out there. I am teaching my children not to fall into the same trap. And I have found someone who accepts me unconditionally, and puts no demands or expectations on me. It is refreshing and feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

I will end off with a prayer, well actually a quote from a Gestalt prayer that sums up this post beautifully: " I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful. If not, it can't be helped."