When Quitting Is a Win

Dr. Vincent Felitti, a particularly caring and insightful doctor who specializes in childhood trauma once said: "It is hard to get enough of something that almost works.”  Which makes for a perfectly stated intro to this article.

This morning I went to a trail in the town I grew up in and started to run the exact same route I have hundreds, if not thousands of times. I’ve run it in the rain, in the snow, in ice storms and sub zero temperatures. I have run it with friends and I have sprinted this route alone. Particularly alone. I have run the Waveny Park trail alone more times than I think even my closest friends could possibly imagine – missing school lunches, at Midnight at 16 years old and at 3AM at 22. In fact, two days ago I walked to run it at 4AM which seemed entirely normal to me – to walk 2.4 miles to sprint as hard as I could for another 2.8 miles, just to see if I could move my time down by a minute. Suffice to say, running has been an addiction. For most of my life, I never finished a single run satisfied. Euphorically high, yes. But never content. I’m not sure if I ever have. Even if I broke a personal record. Even if I helped to set a state record, it wasn’t enough. “Why not a mile further or a few seconds faster” was the ever pounding thought in my mind racing faster than the race itself. It’s hard to get enough of something that almost works.

I quit today. I made it about 3/4th’s of a mile in and just didn’t feel like running anymore. Quitting, when you define your life as “not being a quitter” isn’t easy. It’s even more difficult when that has been defined for you. The town I am visiting, the one I grew up in, New Canaan CT, doesn't want you to be a quitter. From high school football, where they are the best in the state nearly every year, to the executives who work in New York City and commute each day to New Canaan, to everything in between including some horrible memories of middle school dance classes, you are told that success is measured in performance. It’s measured in winning and finding yourself only at the very top of the ladder. In mile times that are better than everyone else in the state. Never second best, of course, but the best. Even as I write this I am reminded of someone I feel a special kinship toward, a female runner (among many other wonderful things) Madison Holleran, who grew up perhaps with a similar mindset. Madison committed suicide while a freshman at Penn, which I am not close to attributing entirely on simply “being the best.” Like all things in life it’s much more complex, but there’s a book on Madison “What Made Maddy Run”  which I own, and for which the Amazon write up reads:

If you scrolled through the Instagram feed of 19-year-old Maddy Holleran, you would see a perfect life: a freshman at an Ivy League school, recruited for the track team, who was also beautiful, popular, and fiercely intelligent. This was a girl who succeeded at everything she tried, and who was only getting started. But when Maddy began her long-awaited college career, her parents noticed something changed. Previously indefatigable Maddy became withdrawn, and her thoughts centered on how she could change her life. In spite of thousands of hours of practice and study, she contemplated transferring from the school that had once been her dream.

When Maddy's dad, Jim, dropped her off for the first day of spring semester, she held him a second longer than usual. That would be the last time Jim would see his daughter. What Made Maddy Run began as a piece that Kate Fagan, a columnist for espnW, wrote about Maddy's life. What started as a profile of a successful young athlete whose life ended in suicide became so much larger when Fagan started to hear from other college athletes also struggling with mental illness.

This is the story of Maddy Holleran's life, and her struggle with depression, which also reveals the mounting pressures young people -- and college athletes in particular -- face to be perfect, especially in an age of relentless connectivity and social media saturation.

The pressures to be perfect. It can be so constant that you don’t even know that you feel it. Until it’s too late, and that pressure becomes too much to bear. As it has for me, and for so many I have seen who seem to “have it all.” Who have strived to get to the top only to find that the view from there isn’t quite what you made out of it. That the view into the mirror is so much more important.

It was, in some respects, healthy for me to be really good at something at this stage of my life. If you are reading this and in your teens or 20s, as most of my readers are, I want you to be really good at something. But much more importantly, I want you to be passionate about it. To love it so that you are fulfilled simply by doing it. So that you don’t need a dopamine hit when you get to wherever you get, that simply requires more dopamine for the next time. Dopamine is a liar, said leading expert Dr. Daniel Z. Liberman and author of “The Molecule of More” on my podcast with him. “It always wants more.”

But I also have another audience in mind. My personal friends who are in their 30s, 40s, 50s and older. All of us in our second halves of our lives. “When is enough, enough?” is a question we need to ask of ourselves. What was mostly healthy and adaptive to me at 16 – to be the fastest runner I could and be defined as good at something (you can read how much of my childhood was spent on being told I was bad at everything here and how that has now helped me to aspire to help others overcome insecurities and doubts ) would now be horribly maladaptive. I have put in a ton of work on not being insecure – and the external world doesn’t do this to me any more. Full stop I do not care about rejection, where I used to care a great deal. Where masking insecurity with performance really mattered. When needing to climb to the highest career or literal mountain when I get to the top, never spending a second on what it meant to journey to the view. But to only seek the next highest climb purely for the thought of the apex. Not the moments on the way, or even the moment at the top. 

So I quit my run this morning and enjoyed a walk back to my hotel talking to friends, texting with others, and simply reminiscing on life and looking forward to tomorrow. I couldn't have cared less that I did not complete the trail. I’ve quit a lot of things in my adulthood. I’ve quit caring as much what others think. I’ve quit hating rejection from others, or feeling it at all, and learned that indeed it’s rarely about you anyway. That there almost isn’t even such a thing as rejection — it’s just a super-sized evolutionary echo to paraphrase psychologist Dr. Guy Winch. I’ve quit having beers with my college friends to absurd hours of the nights and replaced it with going to bed at 9 PM. I could go on and on. But until today, I never quit caring about my running. And when I did, it felt better than any race day feeling. It was better than coming in first place. It was a freedom I wish to you, for whatever may never quite be enough, I wish you this kind of win.

We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.