Giving up

Do you ever feel like giving up? I do. Often. I battle with myself sometimes on a daily basis, over the smallest to the biggest things in life. For some reason I am a person who does not often actually give up however. I go through the battle and usually, I win it, or I decide that the battle is a waste of time and I simply let go. I don’t see that as losing, I see letting go as a conscious choice to decide that something is not worth it. Don’t get me wrong, there have been times in my life where I have almost given up. Sometimes, in the darkest periods of my life I even felt like giving up on life totally. Checking out. Saying bye bye so that I did not have to battle anymore. But I didn’t.

Something held me. Something kept me hanging. Even if by the thinnest of threads.

What is that something? The thing that on days where for example I feel like giving up on writing a report, working on my PhD research, cleaning the house, finding ways to keep our charity afloat, dealing with the never ending relentless drag of my diabetes, or today, when the personal trainer was making me do things that no 45 year old woman should ever try to do – that I don’t give up?

I think for me, it is a lot of things. It is my competitiveness. The fact that I want to win. My stubborn streak some would say. My capacity and drive to grab hold and hang on for dear life. My family, my children, the desire to spend as much time loving them as possible. My passion. My basic love of life, of all the things in nature, the sky, the clouds,the sunshine, the rain and the stars. All the wonderful animals in the world and the way my own – my cats, love me. The pleasure of sitting in my chair at the end of the day knowing I have used both my body and my brain in positive and wonderful ways and as much as I possibly could have during that day and can sink into a bit of mindless television and a chat with my lovely husband. My philosophy of “go hard or go home”. The people I meet every day and hearing their stories. The possibilities of the future, what might lie ahead today, next week, next year, in ten years. The pain and the joy of the past. The people I have loved and lost. Living life and the fact that I have been given the chance to experience it and that I understand ALL of us find it tough. ALL of us have these battles. We are one in this. That this is life.

Yes, I might go into battles each and every day and feel like giving up sometimes, but at the end of the day I would be giving up on life and that is just not playing the game the right way is it.

Helen Edwards