Permission to QUIT (The Permission series part 1)

You can listen to an audio version of this post below!

Have you ever had a conversation that has literally blown your mind? That happened to me on Thursday night during the weekly Clubhouse room that I co-facilitate - Creatives Corner. While I am usually joined by Jennifer Lancaster, last week she could not make it, and I had the privilege to be joined by Ann Zuccardy - a coach, author, speaker, and professor. 

Ann and I agreed to talk about how to know when your creative project is done, and how to know when you are done with a project (even when you are pretty sure that it isn’t finished). While that was what we started talking about, what I walked away with from the conversation was all about the power of permission - in writing and in life.

To kick off my 5th year of blogging, I am writing 3 permission slips for myself and for you my readers. And today is the first one - Permission to quit. 

Permission to quit.

Some time ago, I was working on a book about Wellbeing for Dentists. It was an idea that came to me years ago, and one that I had started writing multiple times. I knew what I wanted the book to be about, and I had even written a book proposal about it, so that I could try to get it traditionally published, and so that I had some guidance for when I was writing. I started by doing a fair amount of research into what had previously been written on the subject and conducted some preliminary conversations. I wrote the introduction, started the first chapter, and I was quite sure that this was a book that I was supposed to write. 

I continued to return to it, working on it bit by bit and I won’t lie it was slow work. One day as I sat staring at my computer screen, I had a realization. I had no desire to write the book I was writing - at least - not in the format or way that I was writing it. Honestly, it seemed boring to me. 

The reality was that I had the idea for that book before I started blogging, or had written my first two books. When I had the idea for that book, I also had a lot of ideas about the type of writer I assumed I would be, and what it meant to be a serious author (and I am going to write more about that in the second part of this series). But by the time I actually started writing this book, those ideas were fighting with the type of writing that I found myself enjoying; and with other ideas I had about the type of writer I was instead of what I thought I “should” be. 

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I had changed. What was important to me had changed. What I was interested in had changed, and it was time to quit working on a goal that a different version of myself had made - particularly one she made because she heard it was the “right” thing to do.

And it wasn’t an easy decision. For a long time in my life, quitting was something that I didn’t do willingly or easily. I held perseverance as a high value, and thought of quitting as a copout; as the type of thing you did when you couldn’t cut it. It was a sign of weakness in my mind, and the idea of quitting even now still fills me with shame, both when I am thinking about walking away from something, and when I think back to things I have quit. I know that when I thought about quitting, I believed it was for people who are weak, flighty, or lazy… Who have commitment issues.

Added to that, there are many societal messages that reinforce our ideas about quitting. Sayings like winners never quit, and quitters never win have been attributed to Vince Lombardi, Napoleon Hill, and Ted Turner (when I searched the internet). I read the book Grit by Angela Duckworth cover to cover like I am sure hundreds of people did. And in the back of my mind when I hear the word practice, it is almost always followed by the words “practice, practice” - as I can hear my dad expounding to me the importance of remaining committed to the things that were important to me and that I wanted to succeed in.

And you know what - he was right. There is value to remaining committed, to putting in the practice, to learning and improving at the things you want to get better at, and this is true everywhere - including creative pursuits such as writing. So many lessons can be learned from finishing what we start (I even wrote about it here!) that have nothing to do with the actual project we finished. For me, finishing my first book taught me about so much more than writing.

So it stands to reason that because of the pressure and the upbringing that some of us have (and that I certainly had) and the shame that may be wrapped up in leaving something unfinished, many of us struggle with the idea of quitting. Walking away from the thing we are creating can be the hardest of all - and that can be a piece of art, a book that we have put a lot of time or energy into, and even a relationship or a life we are building. And there are many other things that make it hard for us to walk away from the things we are creating. Sometimes, our identity is wrapped up in what we are creating. Sometimes we are concerned with the “sunk costs” - and we think about the loss of everything we have invested so far. Sometimes we are grieving dreams that we have long held. 

Quitting isn’t easy, and some of us would say - it’s a bad habit to practice.

So this might seem like a strange permission slip to start with, but hear me out on this one. 

Because - I sometimes think we need to give ourselves permission to quit. And there can be many reasons why it’s a good idea to quit.

Why quit?

I think it happens more often than we realize: we have ideas about what is important to us - and sometimes these are ideas that we grew up with. We set goals based on what we think we should be achieving, based on culture, early influences. And then we wake up in our 40s, struggling to remember why we are even working on and towards these things.

As we change and we grow, we need to consider if the goals that we are working on are in alignment with our current values, circumstances and what is important to us now. 

Perhaps we are no longer interested in something that we used to be. Perhaps we have decided that we have more important things to spend our money and our time on, as we are faced with the reality that we only have so much energy or bandwidth. Perhaps we are tired of creating the things we feel that we “should” be creating, and we are ready to create what we really want! (more on that in part two of this series). 

Whatever the reason, if you realize that the thing you are creating isn’t aligned with your values and what is important to you then I give you permission to quit.

Permission to quit writing the palatable version of the story you really want to tell; to quit living the palatable version of the life that you want to live.

Permission to quit chasing the dreams that your parents had for you.

Permission to quit writing (or reading) the boring book that you are working your way through.

The beautiful thing about giving yourself permission to quit in this context, is that you can give yourself permission to pursue the things that you value now. You can give yourself permission to realize the dreams that you have as an adult instead of chipping away at those you had as a child. You can give yourself permission to create the project that would be so… much… fun instead of the one that you think you “should” be creating.

So I would love to know in the comments - what do you need permission to walk away from?

What creative pursuits do you know it is time to let go of? 

What do you need to quit?

And I send you big love from a small island.

PS - I eventually wrote the wellbeing for dentists book in exactly the way I wanted!! Next week is all about permission to write!!

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