What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

In the 1970s, I wanted to become a Major League Baseball player. There was one problem: I sucked.

I couldn’t hit a curveball. I couldn’t catch up to a high fastball. At third base, I could field a grounder and then launch the throw twenty feet over the first baseman’s head, turning a routine out into an emergency evacuation of the opposing dugout. By thirteen, the scouting reports were conclusive. I quit.

Next came bodybuilding. I actually showed some promise. In 1981, I took runner-up in Mr. Teenage San Francisco. But that was about as far as the genetics were going to carry me. I could build a respectable mid-level physique, but I wasn’t going to become Sergio Oliva or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those men appeared to have been assembled in a laboratory using replacement parts from livestock. I quit bodybuilding that same year.

Then I wanted to become a pianist and composer. Unfortunately, reading music and writing compositions on staff paper struck my brain with roughly the same clarity as vector and stochastic calculus. Another dream quietly left the building.

Next came the Smooth Bachelor.

This was my plan to become a smooth, smarmy bachelor who knew exactly what to say to women. My life would be full of hot tubs, champagne, water beds, and lava lamps. Unfortunately, I possessed approximately the same romantic smoothness as Richard Lewis after five cups of espresso. The Smooth Bachelor era was brief and catastrophic.

Then came the big one.

I would become a novelist.

This ambition survived longer because I could actually write. I had a quirky, neurotic personality. I could make people laugh in conversation. Surely these qualities meant that somewhere inside me lived a novelist waiting to emerge.

They didn’t.

My novels were usually constructed around premises sturdy enough to support a Saturday Night Live sketch. I would then stretch the premise across two hundred pages and wonder why the resulting manuscript felt less like a novel than a short story being held against its will.

They were reliably unreadable.

Yet this was the dream I had the greatest difficulty quitting because becoming a novelist wasn’t merely another ambition. I had turned it into redemption.

The published novel would retroactively make sense of everything. All the neurosis, misanthropy, social awkwardness, failed ambitions, compulsions, humiliations, and self-sabotage would be transformed into literary material. I wouldn’t merely have suffered from my peculiarities. I would have monetized them.

Even better, people would admire me.

This was the part I was reluctant to admit.

Publication had become my Holy Grail of affirmation and vindication. Somewhere in my imagination, people were rising to their feet:

“Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff McMahon has done it! The failed baseball player, failed bodybuilder, failed pianist, failed composer, and failed Hot Tub Stud has finally fulfilled his destiny. He is a novelist!”

Applause.

Someone brings me a chilled beverage.

Someone else produces a generous slice of carrot cake.

“Make sure this man feels loved. Make sure he feels special. He has suffered enough.”

Once I understood that fantasy, perseverance became a much more complicated virtue.

We are constantly told that perseverance reveals character. Keep going. Never surrender. Follow your dream. Winners never quit.

But what if perseverance isn’t always strength?

What if sometimes it is fear wearing a motivational T-shirt?

A person can keep pursuing a goal because the goal remains worthwhile and attainable. But he can also keep pursuing it because quitting threatens some deeper fantasy about who he needs to become. He isn’t persevering because the work is flourishing. He’s persevering because he has assigned the achievement an impossible psychological task: Make me worthy. Vindicate my life. Make people admire me. Make me feel loved.

Under those conditions, perseverance stops looking noble.

It starts looking pathological.

That is why Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting feels less like another book on my reading list than an intervention. For someone of my temperament, quitting isn’t necessarily evidence that I lack character. Sometimes quitting may require more character than continuing.

I’ve spent enough of my life chasing various Holy Grails of vindication.

At this point, I’d like to know which quests are worth finishing—and which ones deserve to be abandoned in the woods.