Stop Don't Quit

The difference between the two.

Some wisdom for when you might want to quit your work/art/business/relationship, when things get tough, from David Bayles & Ted Orland in Art & Fear:

“Artists who continue and artists who quit share an immense field of common emotional ground. (Viewed from the outside, they’re indistinguishable.) We’re all subject to a familiar and universal progression of human troubles — troubles we routinely survive, but which are (oddly enough) routinely fatal to the art-making process. To survive as an artist requires confronting these troubles. Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue — or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.”

I sort of quit at the beginning of this year, and I have half-quit myriad times over the past few years. A significant part of said quitting occurred at the start of 2023 when, racked by then-divorced-dad guilt over needing to travel for work, I kind of quit journalism and gave up on fiction and started a landscaping com…