I have a problem with quitting.  I NEVER want to do it. No matter how clear it is to everyone around me that it is the right thing to do.  Even this stupid blog, I tried another platform that I just couldn’t seem to figure out and fought with it and off for about a year and a half.  I kept thinking, I’m smarter than this!  But clearly, I wasn’t.  I had talked for so long about starting a blog, that it was getting embarrassing.  As a last-ditch effort, I showed it to my son, Alex, over the holidays and begged him to make it work.  He said, “why are you trying so hard to make this work when you can use this other platform that is so easy to manage?”  I had to admit that it was because I had already invested so much time, and way too many dollars in the first one.  That is a pretty crappy reason to stay in a bad relationship with my blog platform, but there you have it. 

A few weeks later I was investing my heart and soul again in that old bad blog. After I’d burned though most of my Saturday I was at the end of my rope.  My husband innocently asked of me a simple request and I started to cry.  You know that ugly cry that makes a man wonder why he doesn’t live alone? 

A little background.  While I’ve been talking about this blog for over a year, Randy decided on vacation a couple of weeks earlier that he wanted to start a fishing and travel blog.  So, he did, just like that.  It was already up and running.  It is a simple platform, and he did it for free.  I’m amazed and annoyed by his capabilities.  What he asked of me was to upload some of the pictures I had taken on our trip so he could post them to his blog.  It was the final blow to my fragile unfulfilled writer’s heart.

After I sobbed a while, pitifully in the bathroom, I realized.  I’m not having fun.  In fact, this really sucks! I don’t have to stay with that old blog just because I invested in it.  Time to move on, and here I am, actually online and starting to enjoy it! 

There have been other times I didn’t quit when I should have.  Heavens, I stayed in a marriage with a gay man for two decades! I don’t learn easily, but I do learn!

I’ve heard it said that bad relationships are like shattered glass. Sometimes it is better to leave it broken than to hurt yourself trying to put it back together.  While that’s true, I think that it may be easier to let go of broken glass, because it’s obviously useless.  What about those relationships that are bad but still look good?  The ones that we believe if we tried hard enough, we could make it work?

Have you ever had a beautiful, expensive pair of shoes?  You try them on in the store and they pinch just a little, but you think they are so lovely, you will break them in, and then they will be perfect.  That is what these relationships remind me of.  You admire and cherish them, others may admire them as well. Then you end up wearing them on a loooooong day.  You are in so much pain you have to take them off and carry them around, or worse, keep walking in misery.  Why do we do that?  I’ve had lots of these shoes.  I put them on the rack and a few months later I forget just how bad they felt and put them on again.  It’s NUTS!  Donate the stupid things and let them be someone else’s pain in the… foot.

Time to hold out for cute shoes that feel good too.  They exist, but they are rare, just like good relationships.  Cherish them my Divas, and know when to quit the bad ones!