On Not Giving Up

Letters on self-abandonment, identity, and finding your way back.

I’ve been thinking about how incredible we are, especially in terms of perseverance and resilience.

I know there are days when you might feel like you can’t keep pushing through, hoping the outcome you want arrives sooner. Or those days when you feel like your brain will explode with the thought of another week of what feels like Groundhog Day.

I feel those days too. This week on nursery drop off, a dad that I’m friendly with greeted me with “another drop off day” and rolled his eyes. He was being funny, it was funny, but I responded — probably a bit too emphatically — “Why did no one tell us how boring our lives would also become when we had kids?” I then reeled off some trope about the monotony, the routines, the drop-offs, pick-ups, the entertaining, the meal planning, plus all the joyful bits and the hormonal bits (theirs and ours) that combine to make up 18 years per child (if we’re lucky).

I felt a little bad afterwards because what I think and how I share it is always nuanced. I never have a blanket opinion because I believe there's no right answer; it’s always about our life experience.

Thankfully, the dad didn’t write me off as some middle-aged nutter, in the midst of navigating a geriatrically born toddler, and he continued to be cordial all week.

It made me wonder, though, how we just fall into routines and monotony without ever really questioning if there is possibly a better way to do all of this.

For the past few years — since my toddler’s arrival — and with her very imposing presence in our lives (she’s a lot, she’s delicious, but she’s a lot lol), I’ve tried not to succumb to the feeling that I’m on a treadmill to 18 years from now.

Instead, I’ve been gently, sometimes clumsily, trying to shift the way I think about the time we’re actually in, and how we might use it in a way that feels a little more alive than it often does.

It’s very easy to let life narrow without noticing.

I don’t mean this in the way that things are falling apart. We still fill our days; we still meet our responsibilities; the children are cared for; the bills are paid; the roles are played. So, from the outside, it all looks as it should.

But internally, something can start to flatten.

The edges soften in a way that isn’t restful; it’s dulling. Variation disappears. You stop expecting much from your days beyond getting through them. And over time, without ever consciously deciding it, you begin to live in a much smaller version of what your life could hold.

But we still keep going.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

Even in the monotony, the repetition, the frustration of doing the same things over and over again, we keep showing up. We keep caring, tending to what needs tending.

I find that deeply human, and I love it.

But I don’t think resilience is just about enduring.

I think there’s another layer to it that we don’t speak about as much.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that repetition, you could pause just long enough to ask yourself if there’s another way to experience what you’re already living.

This isn’t about overhauling your life, escaping it or rejecting the responsibilities you’ve chosen or been given.

It’s about meeting it all in a slightly different way.

Perhaps it looks like noticing where you’ve gone onto autopilot and gently coming back. It might be to bring a bit more presence into moments that feel like they don’t deserve it. Or even to create small pockets of something that feels like yours within a life that can sometimes feel like it belongs to everyone else.

I’ve been trying to do that in small ways.

Sometimes it’s as simple as not rushing through something that I usually rush through, like washing, ironing, or even pouring cereal. I’ve also started to let moments settle for a while before moving past them, like when my toddler refuses to go to sleep and just giggles for an hour before giving in to her tiredness (no matter how wound up I get, I pause for a bit to realise, this won’t last forever). Other times, it’s allowing myself to want more, even if I don’t yet know what “more” looks like or how it fits into the life I currently have.

And sometimes, if I’m honest, it’s just catching myself when I start narrating my life as something I need to get through.

That story is far too easy to believe.

For me, that can look like I’m in a survival phase. I might think that things will feel better later. Or that the life I want is waiting somewhere beyond this version of it.

Maybe some of that is true. Different seasons do bring different freedoms.

But I don’t want to miss this one by constantly looking past it.

Even in its boredom, its repetition, in the parts that feel like they’re asking more of me than I have to give some days, I still believe there is something here.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m an optimist, but it feels like something that’s alive, that’s shaping me and hopefully that, years from now (probably the next 18 years), I might look back on today with a kind of tenderness I can’t fully access while I’m in it.

I wonder if that’s where the resilience really sits?

Instead of resilience being in our ability to keep going, it might be in our willingness to stay present enough to find meaning, even when life feels small.

I’d love it to feel like we’re still in a relationship with our own lives, rather than just moving through them.

Look, when you strip it all back, yes, life becomes repetitive at times. It does. Routines are helpful. Consistency and discipline can be life-changing, but is it worth disappearing into that repetition?

Could we find ways — no matter how small — to remain awake inside it all?

For me, at least, it feels like a version of resilience worth holding onto.

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Do you have any neat tricks that help you get through monotony so it still feels like your life is alive within the routine? It would be great to get comments on this post, as they could act as tips for others reading, which would be pretty cool 😎

With love,