Diary of Surrender, Week 12: Giving Up on the Diary of Surrender.
It’s just not honest anymore.
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I’m writing a diary about my year of giving up, although this is the last installment for reasons that become apparent below. You can read about why I gave up here, and the previous week of saying fuck it here.
When I first started this strange little project, writing about giving up on things big (friendships) and small (weight loss), I was pretty impressed with myself. I was proud of finally realizing that striving for unreachable goals is a bad way to live, and I felt liberated. I also felt like writing about it would give me enough structure to make myself a better writer — a homework assignment, if you will. And of course, like every other writer here, I thought that at the end of it all I would get an extremely lucrative book deal — each chapter one week of surrender — which would allow me to pay off all my credit card debt and maybe even start a movement of men and women in their fifties who realized that life is really hard to get right, and it’s okay to just watch a lot of television. There would even be a podcast and a YouTube channel.
My plan was to write 52 installments, a full year. But as time marched on, I had less and less to write about. You can, after all, only give up so much. By last week’s installment, by my count I had given up on weight loss, finding love, some friendships, rituals, doing anything on weekends other than becoming a bed creature and staying in bed all day watching (admittedly, really good) television, and using my CPAP machine. I think there were weeks that I freaked out about the war in Ukraine, and railed against customer service people.
And there was one week I admitted that I had nothing left to say, but despite that I wanted to keep going. It was a homework assignment after all! And I am a good girl and I do all my homework. Always have.
But I have to stop writing the Diary of Surrender, because it’s no longer an honest endeavor. The truth is that I’m not actually giving up. Case in point: while I’ve given up on changing the way my body looks, I also just hired a nutritionist — -a Hail Mary, sure, but also proof that I’m not truly throwing in the towel. And even though I’ve given up on toxic, strangled friendships, I’ve…