Giving up

the politics of feeling bad and getting better, and how to tell the difference

William Grill, Cumulus

Last week I gave up.

I don’t spend much time thinking about giving up, about the times I throw in the towel. On my CV starting dates announce potential. I began this work, started this project, joined this board. We assume the timeline is marked by natural endings – you’ve completed your term. Better yet, you’ve moved on to something more prestigious, that earns better pay. You must explain to an employer a gap in work history. It isn’t enough to say, “I didn’t want to do it anymore, so I stopped.”

I don’t feel good about giving up. In this case, several people tried to talk me out of it. This is the work. I heard wonderings about the fate of the project. I felt myself wanting to back out of my giving up. I made excuses that I thought would be acceptable. So this week I went back and read Adam Phillips’ essay on giving up (from his book on the subject).

We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and fearful. That is to say we tend to value, and even idealise, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them. Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not; giving up doesn’t usually make us proud of ourselves; it is a falling short of our preferred selves; unless, of course, it is the sign of an ultimate and defining realism, of what we call ‘knowing our limitations’.

I think about the thing I gave up last week and how I said, “I can’t do it anymore,” which, of course, I could have. I could have kept going even though this thing made me anxious, even though I’d lost sleep over it, even as I’ve struggled with my capacities, even though the project has turned towards a politics of feeling bad. I could have kept on. That’s what I do most of the time for no other reason than that going on is what we do and that my personal destruction is the cost I pay (to whom?). Already, as I write this, I am trying to justify myself. Maybe I’m writing this as a justification.

Who do we believe we have to justify ourselves to, Phillips asks. In part, to ourselves. “Heroes and heroines are people who don’t give up; they may sometimes turn back but they ultimately persevere.” But heroes share this in common with their foils: tragic heroes and villains. They also will never give up, and it is this perseverance that marks their tragic end.

Donald Trump will never give up. Joe Biden will never give up. The debate we saw a few weeks ago was tragic and frightening because we watched two elderly men who cannot quit because their hubris created a cul-de-sac of their lives. The kind of self you must construct to get to the position of President is the kind of self that is chained to its own potential, its own necessity.

Giving up is the opposite of being stuck. It is the ability to change your mind, to see, as Phillips explains, quitting as “a way of succeeding at something else.” There is a kind of giving up that comes down to not trying hard, not working at it, not persevering. But there’s also the kind of giving up that comes to the realization that there’s something preferable that is worth the giving up.

I ought to be more introspect, or at least more attentive to giving up because I am in a religious tradition in which the centrifugal force is giving up. Jesus gives up his life. He doesn’t want to – he chooses to. He gives up because life is something precious to give up. Terry Eagleton, in his book Radical Sacrifice, talks about the early heretical sect of the Donatists who were obsessed with eternal reward and would demand that armed travelers they met on the road kill them. Donatists would threaten these travelers with violence if they would not. They would throw themselves off cliffs and into water for their heavenly prize. “There is no merit in casting off what you find pointless in any case. Giving up drinking bleach for Lent is not generally considered a sacrifice,” Eagleton writes. “An abundant life is not an easy one to abdicate.”

In contrast, I suspect that most of us are formed by a kind of Winston Churchill ethic, the kind we hear in his speech to school children during World War II: “never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” It’s a war time sentiment and an ethic that becomes corrosive and debilitating if we look at our lives like they are a battlefield. Instead, the question we might better ask is, am I giving up for the right reasons? Who determines the rightness? What is on the other side?

Perhaps part of my need for justification (still writing this!) is that I recognize giving up is also political. I might give up on trying to quit smoking but that decision participates in markets, shifts the wellness of bystanders, participates in factory labor and trade policies. In the political worlds I often inhabit, the actions of the individual are considered inconsequential (it doesn’t matter how hard it is – never give in!). That’s the problem with liberalism, a problem I don’t want to have – that everything is reduced to social relationships, to interpersonal exchange. Giving up because something is bad for you is suspect (interestingly this is true for some versions of church and some versions of leftism).

I’ve continued to find myself drawn back to the work of prison abolition because of the narratives of giving up that refuse to negate individuals or institutions. In the work of imagining a world beyond state surveillance and punishment, not giving up on people requires giving up on particular institutions. In order to create a social world where, as Paolo Freire wrote, it’s easier to love, we are building within our communities the capacities for that love: accountability, honesty, joy, freedom. Grinding out commitment in collectives that refuse this form of life, no matter what their stated goals, is the sort of space we ought to give up on.

There’s a politics to feeling bad in this way, to the grinding out no matter what. Sarah Ahmed, in the context of Australia, describes one form of this politic: “The shameful white subject expresses shame about its racism. In expressing shame, it ‘shows’ that it is not racist; if we are shamed, then we mean well. The white subject that is shamed by its racism is hence also a white subject that is proud about its shame. The very claim to feel bad (about this or that) also involved a self-perception of being good.” This is the source of Robin D’Angelo’s popularity in creating collective spaces of shame around “white fragility.” White women prove we are not racist by feeling proud about feeling bad about our racism, and that is the service that D’Angelo provides (for a hefty fee). 

It would seem, or so I believe, that giving up on linking feeling bad with justice is correct. Ahmed pushes the point – assuming that every injustice produces bad feelings is bad politics (I talked about this in my piece on trad wives). Not giving up on abusive relationships can feel good to people who have been trained to never give up on marriage. Being “happy” while experiencing harm doesn’t mean we throw up our hands at this self-assertion (if they’re fine, it must be fine), it leads us to ask “what kind of political and personal formation creates this vision of suffering? Should we keep doing it?”

Keeping at it while suffering and utilizing the suffering as an explanation for why to keep at it forms a circular and deadly logic. I think Ahmed is right that we should be suspicion of and eventually give up on ideologies that indulge in this politics of feeling bad:

Political struggle is a struggle because what we struggle against can dimmish our resources, our capacities for action, our energy; it can even take our lives. This is why justice has to leave room for feeling better, even it is not about feeling better… Feeling better is not a sign that justice has been done, nor should it be reified as the goal of political struggle. But feeling better does still matter because it is about learning to live with the injuries that threaten to make life impossible.

Giving up is, in part, an assessment of the politics of feeling bad. It requires work and patience to sort out, and that work is political-as-personal. It’s part of changing and growing, recognizing our capacities, all of which creates the grounds for the world we want. Or at least I hope.