I don’t think we talk enough about it being 100% ok to abandon your goals.
There is so much about keeping on trying and working hard and You Can Achieve Anything When You Put Your Mind To It which is a great sentiment. And for the large part its true and I don’t intend to contradict that when I say that look: sometimes you have to quit and that’s ok.
There is no virtue in pursuing a goal to the detriment of your health and happiness. Not every goal is attainable for you no matter how much you want it and it isn’t shameful to walk away from an aspiration that isnt working for you or is sapping your energy and it doesn’t feel worth it anymore.
You’re no less for changing your mind about something halfway through, or losing interest, or deciding other things are more of a priority than getting fit, running that marathon, getting into med school or whatever else you hoped to do. Forgive yourself, move on.
In a similar vein, and something I’ve been struggling with: You can come back.
Wrote a lot of poems and stories as a middle schooler? Lost that somewhere along the way? You can come back.
Made a lot of art as a kid? Gave up because it wasn’t “good enough” or “practical”? You can come back.
Life is hard, college is ridiculously difficult. It’s okay to give up and focus on trying to take care of yourself. You can go back.
You never have to pick dreams back up, and sometimes it’s ridiculously hard to do so, but you can if you want. It’s up to you.
YES YES YES.
I feel like a lot of people know this story already, but I’m gonna tell it again.
I have always written. I started when I was five and asked for a typewriter for Christmas because I wanted to “make books” and I knew books weren’t handwritten. (I got it, and my mom spent years teaching me how to touch type so I’d have a marketable skill.)
Starting around 2000, I started submitting stories. My first pro gig was writing for a now-defunct roleplaying game, Tribe 8. I wrote terrible, TERRIBLE short sci fi and fantasy. I wrote a terrible novel. Then I had my first short story sale, to Strange Horizons. I kept writing terrible stories and wrote another terrible novel.
Then in 2003, my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. We lived together at the time, and I became her primary caregiver. I stopped submitting stories. I stopped writing. After she died in 2006, it never occurred to me to go back. Everything I’d written was awful, after all.
Then in 2012, I stumbled into the Sherlock fandom. After years spent looking down my nose at fanfic (yeah, I was one of those writers), I started reading it. Then I started writing it. After 9 years, I started writing again. I. loved. it. I wrote fanfic like a fiend (and really haven’t stopped).
Later that year, I was in a chat room with other Sherlock fans, and one of them, @adiprose, mentioned that she really loved my writing and I was as gleeful to hear that as you might imagine. So I hopped over to her blog. And HOLY SHIT, it turned out she’s a literary agent. With an agency I’d stalked back in my sci-fi days. I messaged her, flipping out. “OMG YOU’RE AN AGENT AND YOU LIKE MY WRITING.”
Jen told me if I ever had anything original written, she’d love to see it. I started looking for ideas for a new novel pretty much that day. I ended up revamping one of my long Sherlock fics. It took me the better part of a year, but sent it to her. And then waited.
When she offered to represent me, I ran around my living room screaming before saying yes. 🙂 Within six months, she’d sold that book, The Farther I Fall, and its follow up, As Lost as I Get, to Berkley Intermix. I’m working on a new book as we speak.
I stopped writing for 9 years. I thought I was never going to write again. And within three years of starting again, I published my first novel, at the age of 42.
It is never, ever too late to pick up a dream again.
I’m not professional, but, if I can add onto this amazing story:
I too have always written, probably since I was 5 as well. Somewhere in my mid-late 20s though, I more or less gave up. I told myself it was never going to happen, nobody would ever want to buy my stuff.
Then I did nanowrimo. I had people show interest. I figured if no publisher would pick me up, maybe I could look at self publishing, and finally did in my early 30s. I haven’t sold a lot, but it’s out there.
And I discovered fanfiction, at the age of 34, and fell into that, and yeah it’s fic but i know it’s a helluva lot of practice and people like it and even if I’m never A Professional Author that my stories are out there and people read and enjoy them. I’ve even done some ghostwriting, not really enough to pay the bills, but enough to keep me afloat in hard times.
Let me tell you, the first year I got a tax thing for royalties felt amazing, even if it was only, like $20.
So you can come back to your dreams. And you might find a way to your dreams you didn’t expect. 5 year old me barely knew what a computer was and the Internet wasn’t a Thing, but now it is and here I am.
Also? I should be graduating college in December. At 37. I don’t know how much my degree will help me, but I’ve learned a lot about screenwriting and that’s another avenue I can explore in my writing.
I’ve found that if you truly have a dream, it never quite goes away. Sometimes you need a break, you need to recharge, or go do something else for a while, but it’s always there, waiting, and you don’t need to make yourself crazy pursuing it.