I Quit Everything

except a few things

On December 25 I called my grandmother to tell her merry Christmas, since she celebrates. Raine said, You’ve been on so many planes this year and I said, I know.

I’ve tried to count them all, but I get bored halfway through, and then start to feel weird about my life—like it’s not really mine. But, for the sake of this newsletter, I counted for you. 17 plane rides. Which is 17 times I thought I was going to die in a plane crash.

The truth is, that even if I had taken less flights in 2021, I would feel that things were off. The past 5 months have been so hard but hard is not always bad. I’ve gone through harder hard things. But I knew, at the end, that quitting would be the more difficult thing to do. Which meant that I had gotten myself into a deep, dark, hole and I wanted out. So I quit everything. Really, I did. I quit my lease and my job and grad school applications. That was everything, and that shouldn’t be everything, which is a good sign that I did the right thing.

I am taking a month long early retirement and trusting the world to catch me at the end. A few newsletters back I wrote about how sometimes you have to remove the things that no longer serve you in order to add the things back that do. This year I did so much getting rid of that by the end I thought I would feel like an empty carcass of bones. But I don’t. I am still here and I love the great silence of red-orange at 6am and my friends who are experiencing this ritual of waking in so many different ways. I love farming and drinking water and eating cucumbers, which is a crunchier way of drinking water. And I love thinking of my dog named Trout who, I recently realized, might be a fictional character for now because I quit my job and don’t have money for a real trotting Trout.

I quit drinking alcohol and I quit saying yes to things I don’t want to say yes to. I quit having a mother and I quit the 9-5. Some things really hurt to quit. Last year when my therapist suggested that I take a break from my mother I told her that it might break me and she said, maybe you need to be broken. So no, quitting is not easy and quitting has not made me empty.

Quitting things takes a lot of trust. It changes us and it breaks us and it eventually mends, with trust, into something else. Quitting is just change. Change propels and deepens and secures the things we love most in this world.

Quit something, if you wanna. And hold on to the things you don’t want to quit. Those are very special things. For example, I don’t want to quit the dream of living in Mendocino one day. There is a store there—a tiny coastal town in northern California—where they sell socks. Just socks! The owner says that you should pick one thing and do it really well. That seems to work for her. I have a pair of socks from this shop, and they are my favorite pair, and every time Sammie sees them she asks if she can have them. I’m not going to quit any of that.

Love and peace,

Jo