Honestly, quitting is never OK. It sucks. You feel like you’ve let yourself down. Worse yet, you feel like you’ve let someone else down. Worst of all, you feel like you’ve let everyone down. How is that remotely OK? If anything, it’s unbearably NOT OK.
The reality though is that the issue isn’t whether it’s OK or not. It isn’t even about how you feel. The issue is whether the alternative scenarios are any better than the one in which you quit. Will you be better off if you did or didn’t? Will you regret it if you did or didn’t?
Don’t get me wrong. I know it’s hard. When you’re in the moment, all you can think about is how awful or pathetic you feel. But it’s precisely when you’re in the moment that you need to try and be your most logical self. Don’t get me wrong. I know it’s hard. (Am I repeating myself?)
Let me tell you a story about quitting. It was my sophomore winter in college. I was in organic chem 2. I was in the D+ range, and there was no way I was going to do better than that on my final. I called my barely-English-speaking immigrant mom to let her know that I was thinking of dropping the class. She kept asking (in some form of mixed English-Cantonese), “Are you sure that’s the best thing to do? I’m sure if you tried just a little bit harder, you could manage something higher?”
Besides trying to choke down the tears from my own seriously depressed sense of self-worth, I had to explain to my poor mom (who was just being her usual cheerful and encouraging self) that there was no way I could magically get an A on the final. And even with that, there was no way I could mathematically make it out with anything in the C range. I think I ended the conversation with something to the effect of, “Mom, I just don’t think my GPA can take another hit like this.” (This was after a string of three weak chem grades.)
It was so painful getting the words out. It was so painful working through the logic of it all. But at the end, the one light at the end of a very long terrible tunnel (that included weeks and weeks of painful problem sets and dismal exam scores) was that I had an out. I could quit. All I needed to decide was this: What would be worse—feeling pathetic with a D+ (or lower) or feeling pathetic with a transcript notation and zero impact on my GPA?
After I handed in my drop form, I felt like a load had been lifted. It was one less thing to study in the last few weeks of the semester. It was one less thing to worry about during finals week. It was one less thing to think about over winter break. When I got my grades, the withdrawal notation was quite jarring. But y’know what? It wasn’t a D+.
While a lot of this is 20/20 hindsight, I’m glad that I didn’t let my angst about quitting cloud my mind entirely. The decision to quit was strategic, necessary, and self-protective. And at the end of the day, it was mine to make, and no one else’s.
Image Credits: Hoi Ning Ngai