When to fold them
Sometimes the most important thing to learn is when to quit, but I can't find anyone to teach me
Content note: mentions depression and hints at suicidal ideation
We teach children - and in many cases adults too - to persevere, to never give up on a dream, and that this perseverance will ultimately lead to success. And I get it, especially with children, who lack the experience to take a long term view and would otherwise be at risk of giving up before they have a chance to achieve anything. But I think it's important to balance that lesson with its opposite: that some battles just can't be won, and there's no shame in recognising that and walking away.
"The Gambler" famously recommends knowing when to hold them and when to fold them, but too many people have absolutely no idea. Asked for advice on when to quit, they can only recommend trying again and again, because surely that's all that's necessary to succeed. Faced with an athlete choosing to take a step back for their health, they wring their hands about what kind of role model they are for young people - even though a carefully considered decision to quit is one of the most important things to model.
(It may be related to toxic positivity - the belied that mental health is best served by expressing only the unquestionably positive emotions, leaving the less pleasant aspects of life unsayable. People who push toxic positivity often justify it by claiming they're trying to keep people's spirits up in difficult circumstances, but ignoring dispiriting things won't make them go away, and trying that can often make them feel even harder to deal with.)
I don't consider myself particularly prone to toxic positivity, but what might be called toxic perseverance is another matter. I've always considered it a matter of pride not to give up hope unless success is proved impossible by outside circumstances, and while that's kept me going in some of the grimmest times of my life, it's also left me beating my head against unwinnable situations long after I should have faced reality and cut my losses.
Without any social scripts to guide me through the difficult process of weighing up my goals and judging what can be salvaged, I default to one of two equally unhealthy extremes. Either I have to cling to my goals lest I lose my entire identity, or I have to cut my losses in the most final way and abandon all hope. I can tell myself this is unhelpful black and white thinking, but that doesn't seem to shake the sense that these are the only real options.
It's difficult to say whether I'd be less prone to this if I'd had more encouragement when I was younger to take a healthy step back. I had a lot of very strong principles, and I was entirely capable of ignoring anyone I thought was trying to persuade me to compromise them. So many things were outside my control that I felt I had to adhere rigidly to the things I could control, and somehow the universe would redress the balance and give me a break or two. An education that could have eased that tendency would have needed to start very early and encompass all kinds of emotional intelligence that nobody even realised I might need.
So I find myself, at the age of 45, with no idea how to even start figuring out which of my goals are realistic, still less how to let go of the ones I need to let go of. On the one hand I have depression, taking every setback as proof that I'm a failure on a cosmic scale. On the other, well meaning friends telling me I'm too pessimistic if I look at the statistical probability of success rather than their inspiring anecdotes of outliers. I can recognise that neither of these is helping, but that brings me no closer to something that does help.
I feel like I ought to have some kind of prescription, if not to help me then at least to save others from what I'm going through. But I've got nothing except a plea for more understanding. Sometimes perseverance just makes things harder.