Diary of Surrender: Week One
Giving up takes work.
About ten days ago, I wrote that I wanted to give up, to say fuck it to striving for anything. I wrote this as if it were a revelation, but if I’m honest with myself (and therefore you) I feel this way at the end of every year. Everyone else does too. I don’t think I’m special in this regard.
But there is one difference, for me, this go-around: I understand that the practice of giving up actually takes some work. Ironically, you need a basic level of discipline to stop doing exhausting yet futile things. At the end of each year, I’d vow to give up one thing or the other, and then come February I’d be back to trying again: trying to lose weight, trying to find a guy, socializing, going places, planning trips. I’d mindlessly fall back into the groove of attempting shit, exhaust myself, and then make the same promise during the last two weeks of December.
I just never wrote about it before, and now that I have I realize that giving up takes actual, conscious work. So this year I’m going to document it. Observe it. Figure out where I go wrong, why I stop trying to not try. I’m going to keep a (public? can’t decide yet) diary to understand why it is that I mindlessly fall back into the race. I should therefore offer a disclaimer: the writing below is more for me than for you. It really is a diary to help me make…
