the art of quitting

I am a quitter. I know how that sounds. But I think there is an art to it. Don't get me wrong, you can't just quit anything you don't feel like doing. That would be unsustainable. However, it can be quite beneficial for your mental health to know when something just isn't worth the time, effort, and anguish that you're putting into it.

One of the best decisions I ever made was quitting an abusive cheer team. It was right in the middle of the season, two weeks before a competition. My mom was vehemently against it, as she thought it would inspire a life-long pattern of quitting when the going gets rough. But I was at my breaking point. My coach was ripping my confidence to shreds every practice and threatening to demote me to a lower level team anyways. My stunt group was singled out and blamed for bad scores and screamed at for not trying hard enough when we were giving our all. It got so bad that one of my teammates would throw up at every practice due to her anxiety and I would sob going to and from the gym. Perhaps worst of all, she tried gaslight us into thinking that she was doing this out of the love in her heart to make us better athletes. But I wasn't sipping the Kool-Aid.

So, I recruited the rest of my stunt group to quit with me. Et voila! I was a new person. My confidence returned. I no longer randomly snapped at my mom because of my constant irritability as a result of so much stress. I even lost weight. Furthermore, I went to a new gym with wonderful coaches that helped revive my passion for cheerleading. Had I stuck out the rest of the season, I am certain that my spirit would have been broken down further and I never would have gone back to the sport I fell in love with at ten years old. I would have continued to dread every minute that I had to be at practice or a competition and my mental health would have been in the gutter. My one regret is that I didn't do it sooner.

I'm writing about quitting today because I did it again. This time, it was a two credit elective class to fulfill a well-being credit. I thought that taking dating communication would be a chill, light-hearted class. Wrong. There was forty pages of reading for each quiz that we had to take before every class. They were timed and you couldn't go back to previous questions. I didn't mind this as much as the group work. I hate group work. It doesn't matter if you get to pick your group, there is always inequality in how much work is done per person and it ends up being way more work trying to coordinate than to just do it yourself. It seems to me that the quality of the work suffers as well. Even that, I could handle. Like I said previously, I don't believe that you should quit whenever you have to do something that you're uncomfortable with. Where I drew the line was the grading. The preceptor said that in this professor's class, you should thank your lucky stars if you get a B. I don't want to ruin my GPA with an elective, so I dropped it. I did feel a little guilty about it because I worried that maybe I was quitting out of laziness rather than making a strategical decision for my education. After talking it over with my mom, I knew that that wasn't. the case. I also felt bad for my group, but not as bad as I would feel if I got a C. In all, I am happy with my decision. Quitting doesn't necessarily mean that you are taking the easy way out. It could mean that you're doing what is right for your sanity, or grade, or whatever. All that matters is that you choose what you believe is the best course of action for you, not anybody else.