Diary of Surrender, Week 12: Giving Up on the Diary of Surrender.

It’s just not honest anymore.

Photo by Andy Chilton on Unsplash (The owl is the symbol of wisdom, but honestly, how do you choose a good photo anyway?)

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…