How I Stopped Being a Lifelong Quitter
All my life, when the going got tough, I literally got going
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a quitter.
When I was five, my parents put me in gymnastics. I was supposed to move from station to station in the large gym, honing my skills on the various pieces of equipment. But I quickly discovered that the pommel horse chafed my thighs and the balance beam aggravated my fear of heights. (The uneven bars were acceptable—mostly because I got to lay in a pit full of soft cushions upon dismount.) After the first few classes, I asked my parents if I could start taking tap-dance lessons instead.
In the first grade, I took up the violin. I quickly became frustrated that I wasn’t becoming a virtuoso, so I switched to the clarinet. In sixth grade, I made the middle school basketball team, but then I heard a couple of the other girls say that I’d only been given a spot because my father was the school principal. So I quit that too.
To top it all off, I quit law school. At orientation. Yep. As I sat there listening to a panel of alumni and professors discuss the level of commitment the program would require, I realized I liked law school more as an abstract concept than something I wanted to spend three years getting through.
