Quit Entering Races You Can’t Win
What happens when you admit you’re far, far away from the finish line
I recently bid farewell to my therapist who is retiring. As we looked back our five years of on-and-off sessions, I came upon a theme that summed up our work together: I no longer enter races that I can’t win.
In my own life, my habit of entering such races was a badge of honor. I was a perfectionist, an overachiever, a person who thought she could outsmart the whims of the universe if she just planned, organized, and worked hard enough. I did this is my work life, in my relationships, and even with tasks as mundane as household chores.
Indeed, life is full of these kinds of races:
- Trying doggedly to fix a relationship with a person who has no interest in personal growth, emotional honesty, or an acceptance of the fact that long-term, meaningful relationships take work.
- Trying to keep the natural (and beautiful) process of aging at bay in a culture that prizes newness and youth.
- Resolving to take a day off or a vacation once you’ve reached the bottom of your to-do list, despite your creeping sense of dread that there is no bottom.
- Climbing the ladder of professional career success, certain that the next promotion/milestone/achievement will be the one where you feel like “you’ve arrived,” but never seeming to get there. You keep going anyway.
- Trying to always say the right, perfect thing online when the right, perfect thing to say changes by the moment.
Like most things you learn in therapy, I learned that this habit of mine was rooted in emotional truths I’d learned as a kid. But it was a tendency that no longer served me. As a kid, it may have briefly kept me safe, but as an adult it left me feeling burned out, unwell, anxious, and unhappy. Exactly how you’d feel if, say, you were about to finish first place in a marathon and were told, actually, you need to run 6 miles more, faster than you ever have before, to prove you’ve really won. I felt like that every day.
The race metaphor is a particularly fitting one for me, because I used to be a competitive runner. In those days, even a training run would be treated with the utmost seriousness; having to stop to tie a shoe would make me feel like the whole run had somehow been a “cheat.” I was running for metrics, achievements, miles logged, and calories burned.
But these days, if and when I manage to lace up my running shoes, the experience is different. I often stop to notice the way the light is filtering through the trees, or take some deep breaths, or I simply decide to turn my run into a walk if I am feeling less energetic than I thought. I run for the ride, the air in my lungs, and the rhythm of my feet hitting the ground — not the win at the end.
There is tremendous liberation in finding the places in your life you can’t win. Sometimes, the solution is simple: Drop out of the race. That might look like ending the relationship where you do all the work or quitting the job that is completely incompatible with maintaining any semblance of mental health. Other times, you can’t drop out of the race. Maybe it’s keeping up with the dishes, the laundry, the things in your house that need fixing. Or the wholly under-appreciated amount of work involved in just being a law-abiding, tax-paying, voting citizen who remembers when the trash gets collected.
In those latter cases, even though you can’t drop out, a mindset shifts occurs when you realize you can’t actually win. You can slow down, laugh at the folly of it all, take a day off even though you’re far, far from the finish line. You may still have to run in the race, but when you don’t care about winning it, you can enjoy the view along the way.
