The joys of quitting

I am a quitter. Yesterday I dropped out of an online writing course for which I’d paid good money. Today I am removing one of those commitment bracelets I’ve been wearing for the last few weeks. I do this often, sign on for something in a fit of hope and enthusiasm and then change my mind when I realize that the enthusiasm was temporary and that the hope is likely to remain unfulfilled.

I’m puzzled about this tendency I have, how easily I give up. I’ve observed it over the years and noticed that it usually happens around very personal commitments, my resolve to be different, to improve, to fulfill my closely held desires. I am not fickle about commitments to group enterprises, to the community. I keep my promises to others but not to myself.

For example, I have just put together an entire new website (not quite public yet) on a topic that is not my favorite thing in the world to talk about and write about—cumulative impacts: the fact that harm adds up in the world, in communities, in our own bodies, and the harm comes from many sources. Yet our laws, regulatory systems, and ways of doing science fail to take this into account. In service to a dedicated corps of policymakers and community activists and theorists who are trying to change this, I have put together this website, figured out a snazzy search system, worked with designers and programming nerds, honed the descriptions and concepts, and got the job done. It is not my favorite topic or my favorite kind of job and yet I believe the website will perform a valuable service, I have the skills to do it, and so I have done it. And it gives me satisfaction.

And I just wrote an article for publication on the CongoCloth Connection, which was not my idea though I approve of it highly. I will get it published. It will do an important service. As I did this, I dropped into oblivion an idea I came up with, in the ditched online writing course, for an article on age-related hearing loss. I let go so easily of my own idea. It didn’t seem that important.

I have often chided myself for this tendency and others have confirmed my sense that truly, I need to stop effacing my own desires and give them priority. But, as with all my personal traits that seem to persist, I’m taking another look at it. I may keep trying to change, I may assert my own desires and agenda more forcefully, but I have a feeling that it will always be a struggle.

On the other hand what, really, is wrong with being essentially a team player? I enjoy being part of other people’s success, I enjoy making them successful, I enjoy the essence of community—everybody takes part and makes something bigger and better and sweeter than any one of us could imagine. I enjoy helping and I don’t particularly need to take credit. Sometimes I wonder why I am more often the helper than the one who is helped. But it doesn’t matter enough to try all that hard to change this fact.

I dropped the writing course because I have a whole string of communal and family activities coming up and I wanted to enjoy them fully without having the dark cloud of weekly “assignments” hanging over my head. And I took off the issue bracelet because I realized that I was never going to become a more gung-ho activist and persuader than I already am.

And this blog is proof that sometimes I actually do write my own stuff, about what I jolly well please.