Bibliographic 2.1: On Quitting
Hello!
HOUSEKEEPING
Welcome to the first installment of this newsletter. You’re either here because you subscribed to my TinyLetter (the original Bibliographic) (hi again!) or because you’ve signed up recently (welcome and thank you!)
This will be a low volume/high word count newsletter: monthly personal essays on the first(ish) of every month. Some will stay public on the web archive, and some will disappear shortly after being emailed out. This writing might show up in other forms in the future as I work through ideas or edit more, but I wanted a place to send out the drafts, a cozy, zine-y space for me to work with. Thank you for reading them.
I would love to hear from you and I hope you’re doing well and keeping cool.
Take care!
Teri
ON QUITTING
When I quit my job last December, I had a month off before the new one started. It was just barely winter—cold and grey, not very snowy—and the lightness I felt didn’t match the season, which was better suited to an August like I hadn’t had since high school, all that obligation-free time. Schools were still open which meant there was childcare, and so my days truly were my own.
This swathe of time was luxurious, but I didn’t want to take it for granted and let the hours float away into the ether. 2020 had already been enough of a time paradox, the pandemic and various levels of lockdowns turning it into a lost, amorphous year. I wanted to feel this break acutely. So what did I do during that month? I don’t remember exactly. I mean, it was a lovely month, but the defining moment seems to be when I downloaded a Couch to 5K app to my phone.
I’ve always wanted to be a runner. I grew up watching my dad jog every day. When he left Greece and moved to Houston to go to school, he learned from a professor he saw running around the track. Even now in his late seventies he goes out for an hour every day. He thinks it’s the secret to a long life, magic. I think I believe in magic, but I also badly want to believe in the transformative power of physical exertion. That something can be psychologically good for you while also improving your heart rate and possibly giving you a ripped bod? Sign me up.
Up until that point in the pandemic, I’d been so exhausted that I hadn’t been able to fathom purposeful exercise, but truthfully I couldn’t understand how to logistically fit it into my life before then either. I also want to be clear that the idea of anyone using the pandemic as an excuse for self-improvement is its own problematic and absurd suggestion. I might have downloaded an exercise app, but any change that happened during these months didn’t come from a spirit of self-actualization. It was always because of a realization that I just couldn’t anymore. I can’t do this, I thought at some point about just about anything that meant something to me: parenting, relationships, writing, jobs, reading. In December, running seemed possible only because it was something different.
My husband, Andrew, had taken up running in the fall, and I’d observed him, amused a little. When he started he didn’t have proper running shoes or clothing, and went out in Sambas and jeans. Imagine! Weeks passed, he kept at it, and then one day he was running 5K, 10K, 20K wearing a different ridiculous outfit, but one worn by all the other serious male runners I’d see around the neighborhood: running tights with loose nylon shorts over top, neon coloured sneakers.
I cobbled together my own beginner running outfit from the collection of company branded swag I’d received over the years, never worn band t-shirts, the same pair of running shoes I’d had since 2016, their treads still pristine. If I was ever going to convert myself into a runner it would be now and if I could run in the winter, I told myself, I could run in any weather.
I dutifully made my way through the program, every other day, sometimes every day. I didn’t want to make a big deal about it; I just wanted to get through it, and I hoped that by the end I would be the mythical runner I’ve always wanted to be.
My daughter, Clara, loves a reality show called Ultimate Beastmaster. She found it herself on Netflix which, because of school being closed for most of the past year and a half, she’s learned to navigate on her own. As far as unsupervised media consumption goes, it isn’t an entirely bad choice. The Beast is a gigantic obstacle course: contestants swing from chains and bars, leap across elevated platforms spaced six feet apart, crawl up tubes and scale walls. A river tinted like blood flows beneath the entire course.
The Beast is hard to master; contestants fall often. They’re mostly male, but there are occasionally women. Clara loves watching them the most. “You got this,” she’ll say to the contestants on the screen, and it’s adorable in the way that only a six year old can make this platitude motivational. She still talks about the woman who gashed open her arm on one of the challenges and, realizing she wouldn’t make the next jump, smeared blood from the wound on her face like a warrior before leaping, missing the rope, and plunging into the water.
I’m a bad runner. I’m not looking for reassurance; I accept it for what it is. The best you can say about my skill is that when the stars align and I’m at my peak I can maybe be classified as aggressively average. I’ve never run a 5K in less than 41 minutes and I’ve never run more than 5K. But, listen, I have run 5K, which when I started seemed utterly impossible. On my 42nd birthday in April, the only thing I wanted to do was run that distance to prove I could do it. And I fucking did.
Running is hard for me, though. I listen to music loudly and those millisecond pauses between songs is like staring into some kind of terrifying void, the sound of my heavy breathing and clumsy feet stomping on concrete reminding me of the laboriousness of the task. The first kilometre is always the worst and because of that I speed through it, eager to pass the hump. Whenever I hear Clara tell a Beastmaster contestant that they’ve got this, I file the sound clip away for the pep talks I need when I’m running, but when I’m out there and I’m tired, the most motivating thought I can give myself is that I can stop if I want to. It’s fine, I comfort myself, just stop. Often I do, but sometimes I don’t.
Then there are times when I don’t feel much at all, when time floats away, but it isn’t the scary loss it normally is. I suppose this is what they call “the zone”, which I didn’t realize until I typed it out, and it's blissful in how numbing it is. But the best moments are when I’m officially done for the day, even if it’s because I’ve given up, because the endorphins flow in regardless—they don’t have anywhere else to go.
Before the pandemic, Andrew and I were smoking, a habit we’d picked up in the past year, usually just at night after Clara had gone to bed, an excuse for us to catch up with each other. We used to do this on vacation and it was obvious that this was part of the appeal, a mini escape. Mostly it was dumb; I’d never been a smoker and it made no sense to become one in my forties. I like to think that one of the advantages of getting older is that you go into things deliberately. You don’t jump into decisions the way you might have when you were younger; you understand the consequences. So it was dumb, but I’d done it deliberately and I knew I could stop any time.
At the beginning of the pandemic the habit was welcomed. It migrated from being just a post-bedtime event, and we would trade off going outside throughout the day so that Clara wouldn’t see us. I looked forward to these breaks, a quiet moment where I could be alone and, crucially, not myself—not a mother, not an employee at my laptop, not a person fretting about the impact of a worldwide pandemic. There was an article going around about how smoking helped keep COVID at bay. I read something similar about taking zinc, so I ordered a bottle. I smoked, I took zinc every morning, I stayed at home, and felt like I was doing my part in the fight against the virus.
As lockdown continued, the habit unsurprisingly morphed beyond its original intentions. Like with running, Andrew decided to quit first for his own reasons. He had to throw himself into something else to do it, and that was running. But I didn’t want to stop just yet—I still needed a shortcut to something other than myself. Once, smoking alone on the porch at night, I kept hearing noises that sounded like someone burping. The sound was actually ribbits from a frog. So close to me with no water around? I was delighted! How could I pass up these fleeting pinpricks of joy?
But thoughts of mortality kept creeping in. We were still living through a pandemic, for instance, and the article about smoking preventing COVID had disappeared in the news cycle. One afternoon when Clara was learning how to bike, she asked me to push her down the street and I couldn’t make it past a few feet. We both came home crying, she frustrated and me out of breath.
For something that I’d intended to go into casually, I was reminded of how your brain and body works—independently of your intentions, your deliberations— and “just stopping” was obviously not the overnight exercise I thought it would be. A few weeks later when I got past the headaches and irritability and, also, mourning, I felt the way I’d felt so many times during the pandemic, like I’d come close to something bad but dodged a bullet. It was a relief, but I also felt a kind of delayed guilt, like I was burning through the reserve of fluky good luck that had been assigned to me in my lifetime, a reserve that I should be conserving for things beyond my control.
After my birthday I stopped running. I got my first vaccine, which knocked me out for a week, but even when I felt better, I didn’t go out for another week. I decided to wake up early for the next few mornings to get back on track, except I developed shin splints in my left leg. I think they were shin splints? Either way, another reason to stay home. I knew that running had its up and downs and that this wasn’t necessarily the dire ending to what I’d only just begun, but it was almost shocking how easy it was for the space that was there to suddenly fill in.
I managed to get back to it, not as frequently as when I’d started, just once or twice a week, but I discovered that the advances I’d made in February and March were lost. I was back to walking after a kilometre and right now five kilometres in a row feels once again impossible. I’d been relieved that with smoking I hadn’t been in deep enough to make quitting impossible, but I didn’t want that for this.
I’d gone into running hoping be taught something about perseverance, but what it really unlocked was how easy it is to give up, how you can look something wonderful straight in the face, be engulfed by its goodness, and still find an excuse to avoid it. Running, like smoking, reminded me of all the clear-eyed ways we self-sabotage ourselves.
I think I’ll get to the perseverance lesson. I just need more time and I don’t want to give up just yet (there it is!). You got this, like Clara says. Mostly I want to get to that point where I’m so tired that I tell myself I can stop. I have to believe I have the option.