The Quitting Way
(Page 3 of 4)
September/October 1996
Evan Harris
If you need to ease into a locational quit, stop checking the weather report for your city or town. Quit reading the local newspaper. Quit voting in local elections. Stop writing your return address on correspondence. Quit telling people where you live. Quit spending time at home. Move.
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If you can't get it together to leave your husband, do it one step at a time. Quit using his last name. Quit referring to him as your husband. Stop sleeping in the same bed. Stop wearing your wedding ring. File for divorce.
4. Achieve and Vanish
This ploy often makes quitting history. The master of them all was Bobby Fischer, who quit playing chess and vanished for 17 years after winning the world championships. Like J.D. Salinger before him, Fischer rendered absurd the anti-quitter cliché 'Quitters never win and winners never quit.'
5. Repudiate Your Ideas
Disown opinions for which you once would have gone to the wall. Meticulously enumerate every little way in which you were mistaken. Apologize for your previous wrongheadedness. Reject the truth as you once conceived of it, even if you have converted other people or written manifestos on the subject and signed them with your own blood. Be like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Write a whole book completely contradicting your original philosophy, just to set the record straight.
6. Deny Involvement
This trick of the trade allows the quitter total freedom. In the face of denial, the reality of your situation is totally immaterial. In order to employ this technique properly, you will be forced to ignore the truth and, sometimes, to lie outright. Deny ever having signed the lease to your apartment, much less crossed the threshold. Claim you have never heard of the company you work for. Say that you never even applied to the college you are dropping out of. Insist that you've never met the person you are married to.
Keep in mind that using this technique will inspire intense animosity and suspicion in other people. Other high-impact, potentially hostile quitting techniques like the Bridge Burn and Make a Scene are child's play compared to this one.
7. Take to Your Bed
This technique is helpful for the quitter at the end of his or her rope. It is suitable for use in quitting ideas (such as the notion that anything matters), hope for the future, and optimism of any kind. When despair is the operative emotion attending the quit, this is the appropriate technique.
Collapse in a heap of depression and disillusionment, driven to your bed in a sweep of psychic exhaustion. Realize everything is hopeless. Intend never to emerge. While opting out is a staple of the quitting way, this particular incarnation of the notion requires a somewhat sedentary nature. Athletic quitters should take to their beds with caution.