Sometimes Quitters Do Prosper (And That’s Okay)

9-24-09

If a sixth grade boy ever tried to throw a desk at you, or you have ever held a large eighth grade boy against a wall with your forearm, seen a principal knowingly let a seventh grade girl get away with flooding a school bathroom, watched that same principal hit a boy on the back of the head for talking during church, question another boy’s sexuality in front of his entire class, and repeatedly undermine and criticize you and your coworkers in front of students, then you may very well have taught at a parochial school in Birmingham, AL. When I taught there, through AmeriCorps, I lived in a house of both first- and second-year members of the program. This offered a nice mixture: the hopeful idealism of the newbies with the bitter cynicism of the veterans. A second-year member once told me that, during his first year, his father had advised him to quit. His response: “I’ve never quit anything in my life.” To this his father replied, “So what? It’s making you miserable.”

He did not quit, and neither did I. We both remained miserable. After a hellish year in B’ham, which included the unexpected death of my father in November (I took less than a week off to grieve), I continued on to my second year of teaching, now on the Texas-Mexico border. Although those two years came largely marred by grief, depression, anger, and anxiety, I fought through, determined to serve my students, and, above all, “never quit.” Though I do not regret my maintained commitment to the program, the fact that this commitment so dictated my actions exposes a fairly common—if not entirely rational—attitude. To put things into perspective, my second year of teaching was relatively easy and successful, but I trudged through miserably. Filled with anger over my father’s death and the loneliness of living with virtual strangers to whom I felt no connection (and some of whom I found immature, cliquey, and vindictive), I never took the time to surround myself with friends and family to simply heal. At one point, while watching some stock doctor drama on television, a housemate commented on the behavior of a character unable to focus on delivering her baby due to a panic attack caused by the sudden death of her husband. “I just want to smack her,” she scoffed, solidifying for me the disconnect that I, as a fairly regular sufferer of panic attacks, felt.

When I left the program, my fiancée and I settled in my hometown of Seattle. Though offered two well-paying, comparably easy positions at upper-end Catholic schools, I chose to work at a lower-income school for less pay and with a six-class teaching load (which actually became seven a week before classes began). I chose this job out of a sense of mission to those most in need, but failed to realize what implications that choice might pose for me and my loved ones. I worked virtually from the moment that I woke up each day, to the (usually late) moment that I went to bed—and on weekends. Still, by December, the sheer amount of planning and grading resulted in a decline in both, as well as a serious strain on my relationship. Over Christmas break, I finally saw the light and decided to leave; my presence there no longer served the best interests of the students or, more importantly, myself.

I say “more importantly” without regret or guilt. I believe in service, and currently work at an organization serving families in need, but for too long did I let that commitment overshadow my psychological, physical, and spiritual needs. Of course, we expect people to continue at an endeavor despite the personal consequences, for fear of that most reviled and despised label, “quitter.” Tell someone that you plan to quit your job without having lined up another and you can see the poorly-masked horror in their eyes, as if presented with definitive proof that their God does not exist or that they actually live enslaved within a complex, computer-simulated reality. “Tough it out,” they might say, or, “Things will pick up.” They could see you almost literally deteriorate before their eyes and still reject the notion that simply quitting could ever, in any possible way, prove the best—or even a remotely plausible—idea. So completely does this ethic consume that it motivates us to keep miserable and athletically-challenged children on sports teams, to support politicians and policies that have long since proven their obsolescence (if not destructiveness), to proclaim faith in pure, unregulated capitalism despite it’s costs not only in societal terms, but in our own personal unemployment, lack of health care, or home foreclosures. It keeps us in abusive relationships and failing business enterprises; it damages once-happy relationships and causes us to neglect opportunities. And yet, still, our socially-nourished conscience tells us, “Keep giving it your all.”

As someone that kept going without realizing that my all (and then some) had long since expired, I can no longer subscribe to this notion, lunatic in its excessiveness. I give, and I work to support others, but not at the expense of my health or happiness, and definitely not at the expense of my wife’s. I find myself in an infinitely better place now, as a result of quitting and starting over, despite the stress and struggle of nearly seven months without work. I did not abandon my principles or compromise myself; I did not let my idealism fall by the wayside. I made a tough choice to give up on something that no longer made sense. Read that last sentence and it actually sounds logical. In practice, however, quitting, even for all the right reasons, is almost never easy.