The Nights I Almost Quit

There have been nights where the honest thought crossing my mind was simply: maybe this isn't going to happen, and maybe that's fine.

There have been nights not many, but enough to remember clearly where the honest thought crossing my mind was simply: maybe this isn't going to happen, and maybe that's fine.

I don't think it's useful to pretend those nights don't exist. Most honest accounts of building something skip them, or mention them only in hindsight, safely on the other side, where they can be reframed as a necessary trial on the way to something that worked out. I don't know yet which side of that I'm on. So I can only describe the nights themselves, without the comfort of knowing how the story ends.

What those nights usually had in common wasn't a single catastrophic failure. It was accumulation a hard week, a problem that wouldn't resolve, a tiredness that had been building quietly for longer than I'd let myself notice. On those nights, quitting didn't feel dramatic. It felt reasonable. Almost restful, in a strange way the relief of imagining putting something down that had been heavy for a while.

I didn't quit, on any of those nights, though I came close enough to remember exactly what it felt like to be close. What got me through wasn't some burst of renewed motivation. It was smaller than that deciding to just get through the next hour, not the next month, and reassessing everything else only after that hour had passed.

I don't know if I'll have more of these nights. I suspect I will. I've stopped being afraid of them, though. They don't feel like a sign I should quit anymore. They feel like a sign I'm doing something that actually matters enough to cost this much.