When Changing Plans Isn’t Giving Up
Two weeks into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), many writers consider calling it quits. The inspiration that carries many through the first week or two wanes, and the word count of 50,000 seems insurmountable. There’s a point every year when I feel like giving up, and it usually happens around this time as well.
I’m not giving up on NaNoWriMo, but the “hump” of the writing challenge makes me think of the time I did choose to give up on something, and how giving up is not inherently bad.
In my senior year of college, I became extremely worried about my future. I had no idea what I was going to do next, but I knew that I couldn’t move back home to a place where I had no friends and no real prospects for a career. Like many other people my age with no clue what the future offered, I decided to apply for grad school.
I got into a school that I thought would be a good fit for me, and thanks to the scholarship I received, I believed that the school had faith in me and knew I would do well. I tried to be as confident as possible when I left my college, which felt so much like home that it truly hurt to leave, and headed to grad school.
The school I switched to was urban, as compared to my extremely rural college where I knew the names of the cows who provided my milk and ice cream. I’d never lived in the middle of a city before, and I felt overwhelmed before I even hit the city limits. My dorm room was expensive, tiny, and infested with cockroaches, and as I started going to class, I found myself with few friends and very little interest in the course material.
I kept going, though, because I thought that giving up would make me a failure. I pushed my anxiety and stress and sadness aside and it worked – for the first few months, at least. And then, since this was a Master of Education degree, I had to student teach.
Anyone who’s met me knows that I’m incredibly chatty and don’t have a problem talking to new people, but in the classroom, I felt so anxious when facing down the room full of twelfth graders barely younger than me that I didn’t know what to do. My stress level soared with each lesson, whenever I was faced with blank stares from my students or disapproving reviews from my two mentors.
The teaching style of my grad school clashed with the way I learned, and for the first time in years, I found myself struggling to keep my grades up. I got so nervous before each of my student teaching days that I had trouble convincing myself to go in the room and would sometimes even count down the minutes until it was over.
But I was determined to never lose a battle to anxiety. I’ve seen OCD as a fight for as long as I can remember, and whoever wins the most battles wins the war. The more anxious I became, the harder I fought against it.
And then November hit.
Like all the other years since I discovered NaNoWriMo, I was determined to write a 50,000-word novel in a month. And for the first time since I started grad school, I was finally doing something I loved.
I started sneaking my novel notebook into my free periods during student teaching, and during my grad school classes, I’d scribble novel notes in the margins. It was the one thing that made me happy, and I kept wishing that teaching felt like that for me.
Not long after NaNoWriMo ended – with another success – I was called into the grad school department head’s office and told that “we only want the best, and you’re not the best.” They gave me tissues and I cried not because I was sad to stop student teaching, but because I was sure I was a failure and I’d have to move back home after all.
But then, they offered me a deal: I could stay and do my last semester of the accelerated program, and in the end, I’d receive a degree but no teaching certification. In the last semester, I could take some elective classes beyond the department, and I was no longer locked to a career in teaching.
That first night, I felt overwhelmed. But when I woke up the next morning, I felt freer than I had since my senior year of college.
Suddenly, there was no pressure. I could do what I wanted for my career, and I finally knew that what I wanted to do was find a way to write. It didn’t need to be novels or even short stories, which I wrote at a frenzied pace that last semester, but something that used the talent I loved instead of made me anxious all day would be wonderful.
Long story short, the day before graduation, I was offered a job running a small-town newspaper. I was there for two years before I moved to Chicago, and although the work environment was not the best, I was thankful every day for the fact that I was finally doing something I loved.
In that last semester, I sometimes felt like a failure, especially when I’d see my classmates looking at me strangely or when they’d stop talking about teaching plans when I got nearby. But around then, I realized that there are different kinds of failure.
I no longer see my master’s degree as a failure. Sure, I didn’t do what I set out to do, but by changing my goals, I managed to find a career path I’m enjoying so much more. I’ve been a journalist for three years now, and the career offers me the opportunity to write during the day and then work on my stories and novels at home. I have a life filled with my favorite hobby, which certainly isn’t a failure.
This incident showed me the importance of knowing when to fight my anxiety and when to seek an alternate path. If I stayed at the school for a second year, ignoring the things about the city and the grad school program that made me miserable, I might have had the time I needed to feel comfortable in the classroom. But I would have missed out on so much more and fought so many battles that I really didn’t need to fight.
Ever since then, I try to choose my battles with anxiety and OCD carefully. Not every opportunity I don’t take is a failure, and saving my energy for the battles that matter has helped me work through more problems like my disordered eating, exposure therapy for phobias, and more.
NaNoWriMo is something I don’t think I’ll ever give up on, but I’m okay with giving up on certain other things now. It’s a tough balance to find, but thanks to the lack of stress from a career I’m enjoying, I have the time to sort through what’s worth it. And that is worth much more in the long run than a certification that would make me nominally not a failure of that program, but would make me fail in my most important mission in life: living happily with mental illness.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.