This thread was inspired by a headline about Hurricane Katrina survivors sinking into depression and “giving up.” The obvious sense is that people stop bathing and toning their abs, and end up in the gutter. But “giving up” really has a more elastic meaning. For example, you could “give up” on your struggling career as a songwriter, go back into corporate America, and wind up with a trophy spouse and a house in the Hamptons.
For myself, I can’t see “giving up” to the extent where I would stop paying my bills until my creditors took everything. It’s more likely that I would just keep slogging on, in my present office job, surfing the Internet in my free time, and doing the minimum to get by. It would look a lot like my present life, in other words, but would last longer.
So how about the rest of you? How far would you fall?
I can’t speak of Katrina survivors or anything like that, but I am intimately familiar with the slow-motion giving up that happens when love vanishes from one’s world.
You let yourself go. You stop making efforts to improve yourself, anything from buying new clothes to taking evening courses. You stop going to the gym. You don’t wash your clothes as often, because you can get by foe a day or so by rewearing the dirty ones.
You give up on the dating scene, because you know no-one will be interested in you. You’re just a worm; why make the effort when you know you will be rejected? It’s easier just to go home and watch TV.
You buy cheap canned food. Why cook for yourself? It’s just too much effort.
You sleep a lot, curling away from the world in your little apartment. Why even go outside? Old dreams and creativites gradually fade as repeating patterns of habit take over.
You wear paths on the floor as you shuffle from fridge to chair to TV to bedroom to bathroom and back. The furniture in your apartment becomes older and shabbier, ageing as you do. Every year you become frailer.
Then the Great Blackout hits and the power fails and you can’t get out of your apartment. If you’re lucky, someone will be around to check on you.
I’m really trying to improve myself lately. I’ve been going to the gym, dieting, studying more, cleaning my room and car, looking for a good job, I’ve quit doing any type of drugs with the exception of drinking, buying new clothes, hanging out with more female friends, trying to be a better person. So giving up for me would be to let this behavior lapse and go back to where I was headed.
Giving up would have to follow the catastrophic loss of everything I hold dear – my wife, my sons and their families, teaching, my home and woodshop. At that point I probably would give up, given that I’m in my 50s and I am just not equipped to start all over yet again. I’ve already done that once when I lost everything but my wife and boys, and it was hard enough even with their help and love. So giving up would be me in a one-bedroom apartment working at a menial job and lacking either the courage or the means to just end it all.
I’m having trouble with the concept of giving up - unless it becomes a permanent state that others can say in retrospect, “well, she’d clearly given up years ago”. It reminds me of my son’s admonition that I couldn’t claim I’d “quit” smoking if I ever started again. So for the several months that I didn’t smoke, I’d simply stopped, not quit.
Giving up for me would more nearly resemble giving in. I would stop the medication that allows me to function in a demanding job. I’d simply not care. I wouldn’t pursue my hobbies or care if my home were clean (not that it is currently, but I care, a lot). My clothes would be ill-fitting and likely stained. I would avoid, rather than seek out, challenges.
I don’t think I’m a give up kind of person. Maybe I more of a banging my head against a brick wall kind of person.
I gave up about 7 years ago. For me, giving up meant I mostly stopped trying to deal with society. I’m around other people about once every 10 days, when I go grocery shopping. But I don’t work anymore, and I don’t date anymore. I’d estimate that I have a conversation with someone maybe about a half-dozen times a month. Is that reclusive or ‘crazy-hermit-in-a-cave’?
But I pay my bills; I haven’t given up physically. I mean that stuff about having no concern for your own appearance or health. I shower at least once a day, I clip my nails, I cut my hair, I brush and floss my teeth…all that stuff. Most of what is wear is clean although a bit shabby, but I have ‘public clothes’ for when I go into town. I cook all my meals and I do my dishes. I do stuff around the house, inside (house cleaning, laundry, plumbing and electric repair) and out (mowing, working my highly unsuccessful garden, helping my neighbor on haying days, splitting firewood, etc). And I still call 911 when I have a heart attack; I still like being alive.
Giving up means staggering around in public, shirtless and massively bearded, hair a wild matted mess, mean drunk on something vile, urinating in the middle of the street, swearing at cars and then beating it out of there in a spastic, shambling gate (one hand holding up rotted, filthy trousers) when the cops arrive.
Giving up for me = letting the people who said my weight gain was due to me just being a lazy slob. This is what it looked like. Thankfully, I found a doctor who diagnosed my health issues, allowing me to believe once again that there was hope for my health.
As far as giving up in general, I don’t know. I have been tempted many times, but have yet to do it for real.
Letting go is to let go of yourself. To lose your sense of self worth. It’s clearly linked to depression, when all your interests and enthusiasms has gone. It’s when you’re convinced that you are not fit to live in a society, and that every dream you may have had has been just that. Dreams. Because you have neither the strenght nor the ability to achieve anything of what you once hoped for.
If I were to lose myself completely, I guess I’d go catatonic and eventually spend the rest of my days in a padded cell somewhere.
It helps to be reminded of what not giving up looks like as well. I’ll have more energy at the gym tonight, remembering that it is possible to get the help one needs, move on to a better place inside oneself, and have that show on the outside.
What I described upthread started out as a description of my depression, but ended up as a description of the last 15 years of my father’s life. He’s now in a nursing home. What happened to him upsets and scares me greatly, and is a major factor in pushing me to get the help I need, improve myself, and make a better life for myself.
When you’re alone, not giving up is a lot harder then when there are people around on a regular basis.
Thanks, Madd Maxx, tdn and Sunspace. In all honesty, the years between realising that no matter what I did I could not lose weight and finding out that I had a treatable medical condition (a couple, actually) that was contributing to the weight gain were truly horrendous. The worst part of my “giving up” is a story that still makes me cry.
Once I had found out about my thyroid, sleep apnea, pernicious anemia and vitamin deficiencies, and begun treatment for them, I decided that I was going to have gastric bypass surgery. It was a difficult decision, but one that was right for me. While pursuing the GBS coverage through insurance, it started when I worked for a smallish (only about 5 states at the time) company. When I mentioned to my boss that I was going to try to get GBS, suddenly the insurance policy was changed. Mid-policy. Where it covered weight loss surgery before, it suddenly didn’t – I ended up being wrongfully terminated from that company not long after and could/should have sued, but settled for a generous seperation payout and unemployment.
My husband got a job with a company whose insurance was supposed to cover WLS, and so we started trying to get my surgery through that insurance. The day they called me to tell me that I had been denied is the day that my father died. It was a sudden death, completely unexpected. I got the denial from the insurance in the morning and spent the day crying in a closet because it felt like a death sentence to me. I didn’t talk to my dad when he called because I didn’t want him to be upset knowing how upset I was. He died that night with me not having gotten to talk to him more than a few moments the whole day, I felt like I was both sentenced to death that day and robbed of my father.
I went into a downward spiral during which I just didn’t care anymore. I stopped taking my medications, I didn’t care if I lived or died. I didn’t wear makeup, I didn’t care how I looked, I just didn’t give a fuck. The worst part of it was that while I still cared about my kids and made sure that they had food, clean clothes, everything they needed physically, I know that I was not giving them the emotional things they needed, because I just didn’t have it in me anymore. That downward spiral had me at about 350 lbs if not more, I couldn’t stand up long enough to wash the dishes after dinner. Take the kids to the park? No fucking way. Sex? Yeh, right. I hated myself. I hated everyone else. The only thing that kept me from killing myself outright was the fact that my kids have 2 different fathers and they would have been split up – I couldn’t do that to them.
Giving up isn’t pretty. I was lucky, I finally did go back to trying to fix my shit. You know that song “The Boxer” – where it says
yeh, that’s me. I just can’t walk away when I know there is a solution. So, I guess I didn’t completely give up, but it was very ugly.
!!! You look fantastic! Seriously, when people post that they’ve lost a lot of weight, you usually expect someone that’s about a size 10, looks middle-aged and is wearing business casual. Or at least, that’s what it seems like when you watch the TV shows. But I can barely tell you apart from your daughter, and you look like you just walked off the set of Baywatch!
Man, this scares the crap out of me 'cause I could see myself falling into it fairly easily. I’ve already pretty much given up on dating and I fall asleep on the couch way too often.
But, I’m way too vain and shallow to let my appearance go. That would be truly giving up for me, wearing crappy, shapeless clothing, horrible shoes like Crocs, and ceasingly to care about my weight and grooming.
But I can barely tell you apart from your daughter, and you look like you just walked off the set of Baywatch!
