When You Want to Quit Everything. How to Become an Arrow and Get What You Really Want.

A mom wrote to me on Facebook that her son wants to drop out of college because it’s too hard. He can’t focus. He’s adopted and so the mom wrote to me because she had read my book and knew I had dropped out of college a bunch of times.

I am at the authority on quitting. When friends call whom I haven’t heard from in a while, it never surprises me when they get to the point of the call: they want to quit their job, their best friend, their spouse, and they want my encouragement. Go for it. Do what makes you happy.

Historically, I have loved quitting because I got a surge of awareness: I’m so not that. When you haven’t committed to personal values (freedom, generosity, kindness, intelligence—you get the idea) or to the belief that you deserve a place on the planet, or when you have lost desire to live because you are being told who you and what you should do, and you are living your life like a rolling stone (and not the cool kind that gets to sing his heart out on stage and have wild sex in his 70s), quitting is a backhanded way of creating a life. Not this. Not that. Not you. The thing is, if what you do is quit and quit and quit, eventually you are also saying Not me and you end up with nothing solid you love to call your own.

When my mom used to make Sunday dinner, she’d get out the cooking string to bind the roast so it would hold its shape while cooking. It was a cylinder of meat with three or four bow ties around its wet body. If she didn’t tie up the roast, it would look sloppy and unformed on the serving plate.

I think many of us are bound by cooking string, one around the throat perhaps, one around the ribcage, the waist, the hips, the knees, the ankles. This keeps us from becoming a big sloppy mess. We bind ourselves in order to avoid criticism or rejection. You’re less likely to criticize what is staying within the lines, what looks to be under control.

I can see the strings that bind people. I can see them even when we just talk over the phone. I guess that means I hear them, but the hearing gives me a picture in my mind. It's like this: when we are born, we are tubes of light. We run the experience of being us purely through our body. There is no separation between our experience and ourselves.

I’m a student of the mother/child disconnect. What I have learned is that when a child feels abandoned by their mother a string appears around the tube of light that is the child, and the string tightens and prevents a free flow of energy. It creates a disconnect between the experience of being alive and the child. The brain has stepped in, and the brain feels the tightness and creates stories about it (you are not lovable; you are not smart; you are bad) and then the child becomes an adult who lives out these tightnesses, these stories. Sort of becomes. You can’t become anything that is not light, but what dims your light seems to then be part of you even though it is a visitor in the house, not the house itself.

Here’s where quitting comes in. To free yourself from the string that cuts you off from yourself, there is generally a quitting involved, but the tension this thing has created in us feels like home, feels like who we are, so I have noticed in myself and others that its easier to think we are cutting the string by quitting things that are not really the core of the issue. We get to feel empowered because we dropped out of college, but the real problem, the real string, is that we are terrified of failing, or we don’t want to live the lives our parents have and yet they seem to be pushing us in that direction, and so we haven’t cut the string that formed the day we were in swim class and got afraid and cried and cried until the instructor let us quit, and we decided I am not strong. I fail. and this decision changes our life, for when we are faced with tough situations, we agree with the string, You are not strong. You fail, and we keep our light from flowing freely by quitting and living the bound life.

This is one reason I’m so crazy about getting people to write their stories. If you sit down and write about the light that is you, and if you are committed to the truth, the strings become glaringly obvious, and you can see what you really need to do or stop doing in order to fully experience the light you were given at birth. And this can be terrifying. Things that seem to shape who you are may be the very things you need to let go.

If change were easy it would be called a candy bar. Change can be terrifying. Walk around your house with your eyes closed for fifteen minutes. Suddenly this safe space is so dangerous! Now walk around your life with no idea who you really are if you aren’t the spouse and job and friends that make you sick. You may feel like you are dying, and that’s because you are, or at least the bound, half-alive part of you is.

Being fully alive is painful in that it involves a lot of sensation. Feeling really good can hurt if you are used to tightening around fear and disappointment! You are stretching your skin and muscles! You are getting larger! Ouch!

But what an amazingly good ouch!

What I want to tell the son who thinks he needs to quit college is to stay. And here’s why. (Granted, I have no idea what his story is, and there are plenty of times when quitting college really is the right thing to do, and so this is me playing with an idea, not laying down any sort of you must do this statement.) When you are adopted or when you are a person who feels rejected by a key person, and when you haven’t figured out what you want to do with your life, doing what those around you say you should can feel awful, like you are a pot roast and they are tying you with strings so you will come out a certain shape when you are done cooking.

This is when you can start thinking of yourself as an arrow, and your life as a target. You don’t even need to know exactly what you want with your life or have a solid sense of who you are to do this. Just list some words of things you love: eating, running, taking pictures, dating boys, whatever things make you glad to be alive. If nothing makes you glad to be alive, nothing, as in, not even ice cream on a hot day or a great movie, then run to a therapist and stay there until you find a reason to live. Otherwise, make yourself into an arrow, take that energy of yours and focus it into a tool of flight and aim it for the things that delight you and do what it takes to hit the target. If you love taking photographs, then today you are a photography arrow. That means you pick up your camera and focus your day on the target of getting pictures.

If you are married to some idiot who tells you taking pictures is a waste of time and you really should be helping him with his Suduko instead, perhaps a string is talking to you, letting you see what is binding your light. Listen. Pay attention to the things that keep you from being you. They are called road blocks, and as an arrow, as a race car, you do not need or want road blocks. You don’t even believe in them. You have too much power to be stopped.

You find yourself on the road to being yourself.

At least that is what I have found to be true for me.

I have found great freedom in shifting my focus from the troubling question Who am I? to the much more fun question, What do I want to do now?

Amen.