Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda, but didn’t.
How “winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win” can make us feel like we’re a failure
It’s easy to get stuck in the what could have beens when life isn’t going the way you thought it would or the way you had planned for it to go. Growing up, it’s all set out for us whether by our parents and caretakers, or teachers or family members. If they believe in you and what you can achieve and if they put all their dreams and hopes that they weren’t able to fulfil on you, the expectations can be so high, that you’ll end up anxiously waiting for the inevitable fall.
When you can’t please everyone, when the academic expectations can no longer be met and you find yourself feeling miserable at uni, even though you never really had any problems of that sort in high school. Sitting in a lecture hall feeling stupid because everything the professor is saying is bringing up more question marks than exclamations, when there’s no aha moment but your head is full of huhs?!. The constant pressure of doing well and putting up a performance will eventually start weighing you down so much that you end up staying down, feeling like failure must be your middle name.
The way I had been killing myself to make my parents proud, make my family proud just make myself proud was mind blowing. It was sad, really. But that’s how the cycle starts isn’t it? Putting too much on our plate because we want to do it right this time and then halfway through we realize that it’s too much and we end up leaving it behind, unfinished, halfway done, feeling more like a failure than when we started.
Then you think about failed relationships, how you’re not where you thought you would be, how nothing is going according to the plan you scribbled down in your journal and how you wished you would have made another choice when you were standing before the decision to continue the relationship you should have ended after the fifteenth red flag and the multiple signs from God himself, but you chose to stick beside them anyways. Now you’re here five years into something you thought was a relationship but ended up being an extended situationship. Never fully in and never fully out, time wasted, life destroyed, heart in shambles, absolute failure.
Whats the opposite of a Midas touch? Because it sometimes feels like that. Everything we touch doesn’t turn to gold but into a can of worms and moths eating away at any and every living thing. Dark, I know. Quitting sometimes just doesn’t feel like an option especially if glaring eyes of partners, parents, pretentious friends are on you burning their way through your confidence.
But what if it’s not supposed to be? The course you’re studying, the apprenticeship, the partner, the job, whatever it might be. Quitters don’t win and winners don’t quit is a quote that has always been in the back of my mind, haunting me really. Constantly telling me that if I did quit I wasn’t a winner but the opposite, a full fledged, worthless, good for nothing, weak loser. Every setback slowly but surely chipping away at my confidence. So I continued, pushed through even though I couldn’t anymore, constantly beating myself up, wondering why I was willingly letting myself suffer like that. Spiraling into the thoughts of shoulda, woulda, coulda and how my life might look like if only I would have made another choice, or taken things more seriously. Thoughts that made me drift deeper into the dark hole.
Until one day I realized that it was all about context. If you’re going through a rough patch but it is for something you know is right for you and can be handled mentally, physically and emotionally, if you’re not killing yourself and being in a constant state of sadness and there’s a depressed cloud lingering over you showering you with heavy rain and sending out thunder and lightning every once in a while, to rain on your parade; then by all means go for it don’t quit, don’t stop, keep going, be a winner!
But if you’re going through everything I just mentioned and more then please take a step back and re-evaluate the choices you’re making. That’s what I did and am still doing. So, does that make me a loser? No. on the contrary, I can finally look myself in the mirror without not recognizing who I’ve become and I can even go as far as saying that I’m liking who I’m becoming. And that’s a clear win in my books. Quitting doesn’t have to be negative, there’s just this stigma around it which makes us go through with things that we have no business continuing. So in certain contexts, I’ve stopped calling it quitting, instead I’m calling it rerouting and dropping the heavy baggage of shoulda, woulda, coulda. Because there are thousand different outcomes to a scenario but only one reality that we live in and one present that we get to enjoy. It would be such a shame if we spent it all on what could have beens and what would have been and what should be. How about looking at what is and going from there.
You’re not a failure because it didn’t work out, you’re a winner because you gained valuable experiences and lessons that you can apply to your next endeavor. You’re not a loser because you didn’t finish, you can always start again or try something completely different. Reinvent yourself, break out from unhelpful patterns. You’ll never be completely perfect for others, so how about being more than enough for yourself?
Happy rerouting.
Love,
Maame.
