Please, Give Up!

Two beers down and walking through campus at the University of Southern California (USC), I mentioned to my roommate and my mother that I was thinking about giving up coffee for a while—just to bring my dependence down.

“You’re always giving something up”, my mother said casually, just before changing the subject.

I certainly would not argue, and I was relatively sure that she had meant nothing negative by her statement. Yet for a moment I was quite put off, and I quickly realized why:  we tend to view the terms giving up, and quitting negatively.

Giving up has a certain flavor of loss and defeat when it rolls off of tongue, and quitting has a nasty bite that burns of cowardice and incompletion. Think about it. How many times in your life have you been told, don't give up? Is it any wonder we don’t like to quit even if we know it would be beneficial to us?

The truth is that there are so many cases that giving up can be one of the most beautiful gifts that we can give to ourselves: A job we are unhappy in; a food we enjoy just a little way too much; a friend we love but who brings us down; Facebook.

After some thought, I decided to transform my own understanding of giving up and quitting to be one of positivity by quitting my attachments. I thought of oodles of things to give up that would bring about interesting and beneficial results by doing so. And thus, this adventure began.

The month of March marks my first month of giving up something new every 30 days. I am beginning by abstaining from using personal social media. From there, I will branch out.

Many of the things that I plan to step away from are rooted in some small fear: a lack of visual distraction while using public transportation; fear of failing to meet society’s standard of beauty; fear of hunger or fatigue, to name a few.

That said, some things will be relatively simple to cut from my life, while others will be far more difficult; in fact there are some I may not be successful in embracing for a full 30 days. But the point is to try—to try to give up, and to find positivity in the experience. 

So, what are you afraid of?  What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I ask you: what should you quit?