I Want You To Quit

You heard me.

You know what I did this Summer? I quit. 

I let go of something I’ve been building for my entire life. An idea of my future that I constructed since I first formed conscious thought. I’ve always dreamt of being an actress. But come this June, after a year of intense psychological reconstruction, I could see that this dream was built from a toxic seed. It was not pure. It was deeply infected. I wanted to be chosen and regarded and loved. So fiercely by an entire world that told me it would not love me unless I did the spectacular. As if I could somehow supersede being the token and become the prize. My dream was coated by the need to be loved by the eyes that did not look at me. Did not look for me. I ran into their eyesight begging “I’m here! Choose me! Pick me! This is all I’ve ever wanted!”

I always wondered why I felt frozen every time I read a script. Why I’d have to chip away and melt this icebox that formed around me. It froze my creativity, my personality, my ease. Never flowing, I was stuck. This dream, this idea I had for myself, made me stuck. It permeated my tendons and joints. My brain. I wired myself to wait to be chosen. Yet here I was, at the finish line, in the elite casting offices, and my muscles began to cramp. 

Sometimes something is so poisoned, the damage is irreversible. The whole thing must be thrown out. Some day I’ll go into deeper detail about the mechanics of this infection but for now, I want to tell you how this decision saved my life. How I took the glowing orb and placed it back into my palms. Where I now hold the prophecy. How I will write the story that I was meant to act. 

So now the rest is for you. 

I want you to quit. 

That is if you want to. 

I want to give you the option because I don’t think it’s advertised enough. I don’t think enough people tell us it's okay to quit. Our society values perseverance and grit, but at what cost? There is a difference between being sharpened and being grated. We conflate passion and expectation.

Expectation grates. 

Are you grating yourself down for an expectation that does not fulfill you? The glamorization of resilience has clouded our collective intuition. We look down on the idea of quitting. But what is quitting if not walking away from what is not right for you?

I can already hear the counter-arguments to that statement and quite frankly I do not care. Not enough people tell us it’s healthy to quit. In fact, most people will tell us to stay the charted course. It’s usually with good intention — but if you deeply inspect it….is it? 

Most people will not give you career advice that they won’t take themselves. Most people will not tell you to let everything go in pursuit of the uncharted path. They will usually tell you to hold tight, take the same type of job, and stay where work is guaranteed. If they were to tell you to take the unlit route, they will then have to watch you take it. They will have to experience it second-hand from you. They will have to watch you live the life they were too afraid to endure. 

Most people will only give you advice they are comfortable seeing you take.

When I say quit I mean it in the grandest and most minuscule of ways. If you are financially able to, then yes, quit your actual job. Take the risk. But if you are not, then I won’t tell you to sacrifice your well-being. Money is survival and there are other ways to transform your reality by starting with what you can work on from the inside.  

Quit the idea in your head that you are tacking yourself onto. Whatever career framework you have trapped your life in. Whatever idea of yourself you are forcing into acceptable form. We cling onto what harms us for the sake of comfort and assurance in what will come next because the unshakable dread of the unknown is far more daunting than tolerating another day of unfulfilling work.

There is a truth we are avoiding if we don’t admit to ourselves what we are feeling. 

What are you complaining about that you are not changing? Observe this, but don’t look down on yourself for engaging in this habit. Instead, look at it as a tool. Complaining is your alert system for ascension. It is your mind-body warning you that you are out of alignment. 

But, the key is to not remain in this state. Unstick yourself from what you are saying and hover to watch from above. Shift and observe your sentences from the side. Dip below and survey the underbelly of each explosive letter. Come close and let the spike of your inflection pierce you. Let your answer bleed from your skin. 

Watch for the truth you are not saying — 

And feel it. 

You have to sit with yourself and you have to be very honest. It will be very painful. You will watch the vision in your head obliterate. You will watch the world in its entirety become a different place. Everyone around you will continue playing the game. But now, you have removed yourself. You are an observer watching from the outside. You will experience the figures you once thought you admired morph into uninspiring androids. Though, your perspective is the only thing that changed them. By sitting outside of the system and not participating in it, you can watch it operate as a whole. What it is actually in service of. 

I’m noticing everywhere around me this fed-up-ness with our current systems and the ideals they are servicing. To change our systems we must first start with ourselves as individuals. 

Quitting leads to revelations. That is a fact. You will always learn something new about yourself. If you delete something out of your life nature will do its work to have something else take its place. You are surrendering for something to change. You are making room for whatever has been waiting for you. And there is — something has been trying to make its way to you. But if you continue to block that entrance, it will never meet you. You will only feel its absence. 

When we bring ourselves to a standstill, we are able to observe the wind. Repeated movement and action with no observation musters the air around us. Our incompleteness is wrung into our routines. It jumbles into our atmosphere. Blurring any chance of us recognizing intuitive wind. If we are never still, we will never feel the guiding breeze. We are too busy making a commotion.

You are being held back by the thread of your old habits. You are sowing your appendages together. Your outdated vision of self has trapped any chance of you growing. So much of what I dreamt for myself was in pursuit of healing somewhere I was hurt. I realized that wrapped within each dream, like a lollipop with a surprise center, were my unhealed traumas. It got to the point this lollipop had disintegrated and what was left was its revealed core. Which I stared at and started to see this image of my young self. This very hurt little girl still asking to be loved. Begging to be chosen. Empty-handed and eyes piercing with longing at the world. And now at me. 

So, instead of grinding myself into dust, I am rewriting what I am in pursuit of. Instead, my direction lies on the basis of what brings this little girl, this center of myself, a fire-like joy. What matches can I bring to her? What will strike her into the phoenix? 

These archaic established institutions and the ways they allow us “in” no longer have my gaze. I am looking inwards and throwing my hands outwards. This is my dance, my participation with the universe. What I can release to it and what it returns to me.

You have to update your dreams as you update as a person. My dream to be an actress had to change because I changed. I changed so much. The entire fabric of my life was lifted and jostled so that all I surrounded myself with went flying. So now I am here, with a bare silk sheet that I rest my transforming body on. I am okay with living with nothing set before me. 

And I’m here to tell you that I want you to do the same. That you can throw away the dream. That you can make what lives inside of you real.

I am in the business of creating a life ignited with pleasure, discovery, and transformation. 

Not the eradication of my soul. 

Open yourself to the impolite gestures of a strange path. Bring in your tired wings,

and surrender to the fall.

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