It’s okay to quit without feeling bad…

I am sure you have come across the cliche ‘quitters don’t win and winners don’t quit’ before. While I don’t know how many times you have heard people use this buzz expression, I am sure the expression has come in handy at some points in your life when you felt like quitting but you shelved the idea of quitting.

Have you ever truly felt like quitting so bad that nothing else mattered to you? Did you? If you did, what made you do? If you did not, why didn’t you?

Sometime in the year 2015, I got a writing job at a tech startup. Before I landed the job, I was handling freelance writing gigs. But because the income of a freelancer is inconstant, I needed a steady job that’d pay me monthly. So, when this job came, it was a huge relief.

However, beyond just getting the job, work had to be done; and in my case, it was a lot of work. Being a tech startup, the founders needed to scale the business as quick as possible, and everybody had to do more than their bit to scale the business

A week into the job, I called it quits.

Why?

First, when I got the job, I was given a short notice to resume. But as providence would have it, a friend’s family was magnanimous enough to allow me squat at their residence, even though the place was far from my office.

In order to avoid getting stuck in traffic, I always left the house at 5:30 am just so I could get to work before 9 am. When I closed at work by 5 pm in the evening, I won’t get home until it is past 9 pm, and that was constant. The stress from my daily commute to-and-fro work started telling on me by the middle of the week.

Second, I was expected to write between 3–5 long blogposts daily at work, something I was not used to. I was not lazy,so I took up the new challenge. However, it came with the typical pressure one experiences when working in a startup.

Third, anytime I closed at work, I was always going home with a lot of to-do tasks viz: reading and research ahead of the next working day. So while I always got home at past 9 pm, I used to go to bed around 12–1 am only to wake up by 4 am so I could leave the house at 5:30 am.

Before I called it quits, I made concerted efforts to get an accommodation close to my workplace. I, however, couldn’t get anyone to help out. So, before the stress started telling on my delivery at work, which I knew would have a far reaching effect on what I churn out as a writer, I threw in the towel.

But I did not just feel like quitting. The circumstances that surrounded my decision were valid and if I did not act fast, I was going to lose myself in the whirlwind of work which I may never recover from.

Though I had not gotten another job before I resigned and my situation had not changed, I knew I needed to protect my sanity as that’s the core of my being. With my sanity being protected, I was confident I was going to get another job in no time, after all, I possessed the skillset to work already — only that I needed a platform where I could deploy such.

Looking back at those years now, I feel no regrets whatsoever. Though that company went ahead to become a big firm, I am also in a better place and space right now.

So, as dreadful as it sounds, quitting may just be the solution to your current problem. Just. Do. It.