In Support of Quitting

I quit gymnastics at age eleven. For a while, quitting gymnastics was my biggest regret in life. I was a great gymnast. More than that, I was built for the sport. I was (and am) short. I had surprisingly muscular legs. My favorite activity was the balance beam. I loved the thrill of completing a cartwheel on a four-inch-wide surface high in the air. Gymnastics made me feel brave. At eleven, my coach asked me to join the gymnastics team. It would require me to be at the gym hours before school with even more practice afterwards. I’d have unlimited use of the balance beam, but my time would suddenly vanish. My life would be about gymnastics. I said no. I was entering middle school, which was daunting enough. As I wrote in my diary at the time, I was worried gymnastics would “eat up my childhood.” It probably would have. I am good at many things, but I’ve not been the best at much since I quit cartwheeling. In my hustle-centric twenties, I worried quitting gymnastics set a horrible tone for my entire existence. If, at eleven, I wasn’t willing to give everything to be the best, would I ever be? That question doesn’t plague me so much any longer. I am proud of my child self for setting a tone of balance and sanity. She looked at a world that demands you be number one and said she’d come in second place. It was a good and mature decision. And my twenty-something self was right too: it did set a tone. Life is about balance. It is about finding the spaces in between all the pressure. I understood the lesson at eleven. It is nice to be relearning it in my thirties.