Don’t Give Up When You Feel Lost and Challenged — OLADC#8
Perseverance is what separates the great from the average.
Whoever has the ability to keep moving forward even when they’re exhausted and overwhelmed will be able to reach their goals and reap the rewards of their hard work.
I have a bad habit of giving up when things get hard. I talk and dream big and I make myself seem like I have my life together, and when no one is watching I lay in bed content with my daydreams.
When I feel like I can’t write anymore and feel stuck, I close the laptop and don’t return for a long time. I give up on the idea and start another instead of trying to find a way to break through.
When work gets difficult and overwhelming, I start looking for easy ways out. I look for shortcuts and look for short term solutions to get rid of the anxious feeling.
After thinking about how many times I’ve ventured into new territory and given up when the going got tough, I realized that this was a huge problem that I needed to face in my life.
When you give up, you absolve all responsibility and make excuses to make yourself feel better. When you give up on the things you want and blame the circumstances instead of looking within yourself for a strong reason to persevere, you become a bitter and untrustworthy person.
Bitter because nothing you do seems to work out for you and it seems like the world is out to get you when it was actually you who was impeding your own path the entire time. You just weren’t ready to take responsibility for your own life and weren’t willing to give your all to own your achievements.
Untrustworthy because, when it really matters, you will be the first person to disappear and to let everyone down. You have no integrity — you will not do what you say you will do, so how can anyone else trust your word? The only thing you can give others is your word or your actions, and we are all capable of grandiose speech. You can only do so much with your words — you must show people what you truly believe through your actions.
I find that the relationships you want to keep in this life are all cultivated through perseverance and continuous effort. A relationship needs constant effort from two people to stay strong and healthy.
A relationship is about compromise. You and the other person are two different people who grew up with different people in different areas with different parents and educational systems and influences. You both hold different ideals and values, and expect different things from the relationship. There’s obviously going to be conflicts here and there and there needs to be constant communication to understand each other’s lives and thoughts.
It’s easy to have a laidback and carefree attitude when you’re in a relationship. When the going gets tough, you can always think “there’s plenty more fish in the sea” and decide to break up with the other person.
You start victimizing yourself and seeing the other person as someone who is oppressing you and not allowing you to live the life you want to live. You will start to become willfully blind to your own flaws and will instead continue to find more flaws in the other person. You will blame the other person for everything that’s going badly in their lives.
It’s easy to give up when you allow yourself to become a victim. You can see yourself as an innocent individual who is suffering under unfair treatment. You don’t deserve this — you deserve better. You can always find someone better. And while many times this may be the case, because people deal with manipulative and twisted individuals all the time, it can also be the fact that you haven’t taken a hard look at yourself first.
There’s something that you’re doing that is allowing everything to happen. Maybe you’re not standing up for yourself or saying the truth when you need to say it. Maybe you’re not leaving the other person even though you know that’s what your heart and mind are telling you. Maybe you’re not pulling your own weight or showing the other person how much you care through your actions instead of your words. Maybe if you took a closer look at yourself, looked for ways to change yourself and were willing to sacrifice parts of your life to accommodate the other person’s life, your relationship could be stronger.
Or maybe I’m being naive and thinking that people will not take advantage of people who sacrifice themselves to make the other person happy. Maybe there will be people who will continue to ask you to give and give without giving much in return. Maybe there will be people who will never be content no matter how hard you try. Then I guess there really will be a good reason of giving up.
But at that point, you can at least end the relationship saying that you really did try your best, with all your imperfections. No one said relationships were going to be easy and smooth sailing. I’m starting to see that that’s all feelgood Disney movies and the perception of modern love that movies and novels have convinced us of.
