Things I Never Let Myself Do but almost did: Give Up, and Talk Down on Myself

I always joke that I'm enthused about life. Sincerely enthused. But if I'm honest, life doesn't stay in one mood. It moves in phases. And I've come to notice that every phase has a shape.

There's the phase where everything looks rosy. The phase where you're working so hard and still not seeing results. The phase where your friends are close and life feels full. The phase where money is stable, and the phase right after it, where somehow even "enough" doesn't feel like enough anymore. There's the phase where you wake up to the realization that there's more out there for you. And then there's the phase where life just becomes work  plain, relentless work.

This post is about one of those phases. The one where I almost did the two things I've always told myself never to do: give up, and put myself down.

I had just moved to a new city. If you have followed my story before, you already know moving is never simple for me. Not because it's physically hard  it's that my body arrives before my mind does. I can leave a place, but my mental state takes its time catching up. Everything eventually meets in the middle, but not on day one.

So I moved. I got a job. Things were running well genuinely, twice as good as where I'd come from. In my old place, I was still figuring out who I was. But in this new city, I took on a new mindset, a new turn. I was achieving. I was trusted with leadership. From the outside, it looked like an unbroken upward climb.

Then it stopped feeling that way.

I started making mistakes I couldn't undo. I was in an environment that demanded I fight on two fronts at once  mentally and spiritually  because that's what it takes when you're trying to stay grounded in your convictions while surrounded by every kind of person: believers, unbelievers, the disciplined, the unbothered, all mixed into one space. I thought I had enough strength and enough character to hold my ground on my own terms. I didn't realize how much that kind of fight actually costs. You need a reserve  something already built up in you so that no matter what comes, you're still standing.

I didn't have enough of that reserve. And everything began to fall apart. I was relieved of a position I held maybe only temporarily, but for someone wired to achieve, it still felt like loss. And in that moment, I almost broke both of my own rules. I almost gave up. I almost let myself believe the confidence I'd built through everything I'd already accomplished no longer counted for anything. 

Why am I even doing this?

Why do I carry myself the way I do? 

Let me just let it go.

Here's what pulled me back, and honestly, it's the whole reason I'm writing this: you are not alone in this.

It might look like whatever you're carrying, you're carrying by yourself. It might feel like the world has turned against you, like everything you've built is scattering right at your feet. But someone has walked through exactly what you're walking through. You are not the first, and you won't be the last.

If I could leave you with anything practical, it's this: there are seasons when life is easy, and there are seasons when you have to fight for your own state  your mental state, your physical state, your spiritual state. Do the work in the easy season. Build the strength and the capacity before you need it, because you will need it.

My pastor puts it simply: pray now, so you won't have to pray later. That doesn't mean the praying ever stops. It means there will be seasons when you won't even feel like getting on your knees  and in those seasons, it's not the prayer of that moment that carries you. It's the prayer, the study, the work you already put in when you had the strength to. That's what speaks for you when you can't speak for yourself. That's what pulled me out of that phase of neglect, out of that season of forgetting who I was.

So if you're in your rising phase right now enjoying it, thriving in it do the work while you're there. Build the reserve. It won't make sense in the moment when things might begin to not go planned, and they will fall apart at some point, because nothing goes exactly as planned. 

You'll go through a stretch where you don't understand what's happening. But it's what you built beforehand that will carry you through it and it's usually only in hindsight that you'll understand why it had to happen at all.

So I'll say it the way I always do: do not give up. And don't you dare put yourself down.