I Quit (But Not Forever)

Thanks, Mary Karr.

I don’t want to write right now. In fact, I haven’t wanted to for most of the year. The difference is, I’ve actually given myself permission to stop writing, even though my 2025 resolution was to write every day. A wise man once told me, “If it doesn’t look like you’re going to hit your goals, change your damn goals.”

Of course he was talking about real estate sales, which are harder to control than a daily writing habit, but still. It’s not bad advice. 

It’s not that I have writer’s block. I somehow never have that. Maybe it’s because I hardly ever write fiction. I know what comes next in my essays and in the memoir I’m working on. 

If I dig deep down, I think the real reason is, “What the fuck does is matter?” I mean, look at the world. Does it really matter if I’m writing right now or not? Would anybody care if I stopped?

Well, I might. I mean, I think I would. I don’t know if I would care if I never finished my memoir, because as I’ve previously stated, memoir writing sucks. 

But I go to sleep and wake up with pieces of sentences or even whole paragraphs in my head and I would have nowhere to put them. That would make me feel incomplete. Writing those things down and teasing out where they go and what they lead to is fun for me. It keeps my head a little saner. 

But lately, even that hasn’t been enough of a reason to get me to the laptop, so I decided not to tell myself, “Self, you have to write. Suck it up and write.”

You know why? Because I’ve sucked everything up my whole life and never listened to what I really wanted or needed. If I couldn’t do something perfectly or all the way, I just quit. I quit baton, piano, choir, dancing, Spanish, you name it, I’ve probably quit it. 

And I’ve pushed through when I shouldn’t have or didn’t need to. When it was bad for my health, mentally and physically. I pushed through, because that’s what we’re taught to do: just do it. It doesn’t matter if it hurts you or anyone else. Production is all that matters. 

Except it’s not. I matter. You matter.

So what if I could both take care of myself and not quit? What if I didn’t have to do everything perfectly all the time? What if I stopped pushing through and sucking up for a while and then went back to work? What if I just changed my damn goal?

Because let’s be honest, there were some days when I was writing a few sentences just to be able to say I “wrote” that day. And I still felt guilty about that because it felt like cheating. And I was in a way: I was cheating myself out of the real release I get from writing things down. 

So what if I let myself go a few days without writing and then wrote for a good long while? Wrote about something I really cared about or even {gasp!) gave my full attention to my writing because I wasn’t worried about something else I thought I should or could be doing? 

As much as I want to sit down like a child and say, “I quit,” I'm not going to quit writing. I’m as committed to writing as I was on January 1st when I made my resolution. What I am going to do is quit being so damn hard on myself. All it does is make me feel bad, and if anything, it makes me want to write less, and writing is something I truly love doing. 

And as I’ve written this, I found myself wanting to keep writing it. I remembered why I love to write.  And I also remembered that even though I share some of my writing with other people, I don’t necessarily write for anyone but myself. And why would I ever stop doing something so beautiful for little old me?