Why sometimes it’s OK to just quit
Why I resigned from jiu-jitsu, and other things
Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
What subscribers received recently:
This is how, and what, I eat — my food manifesto (the how) and 7-day food diary (the what)
The rural life of self-sufficiency: why I want it — and if I’m cut out for it. I worked on farms in Portugal to find out
You can subscribe with your email to ensure you never miss my posts:
Why I started jiu-jitsu
I had my first ever Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) lesson in August 2021. The idea of learning to move my body in new ways had been something I’d wanted to do for a while. After the claustrophobia of lockdown, the desire became stronger and I narrowed it down to either dance or a martial art.
I settled on the latter as I thought it would be more ‘useful’ as a woman in today’s world. And who doesn’t want to get someone in a head lock like a total badass? I knew of a few women who had taken up BJJ. I looked into it and I liked what I saw.
I learnt there was a martial arts gym only a 15 minute walk from my front door — this was meant to be! During my first lesson I ended up sparring with the Kung Fu teacher, not having a clue what I was doing but loving the general physicality of it and the aftermath of mullered muscles.
‘We’ve got a feisty one here,’ he said.
I tweeted about how much I had enjoyed that first lesson, even though I was the only woman in a group of 12. ‘This is going to be an excellent new thing,’ I thought.
I wasn’t the only one
Fast forward a year and a half to March 2023 and the brilliant
shared that she had just started BJJ. How cool, I thought. Two women, not that far apart in age, embarking on this new sport. In my head I thought we might progress together. Perhaps we might even spar one day.Last month, just over a year since Poorna first started BJJ, she earnt her first stripe.
This is no small success. It’s the first promotion you receive in the sport, it’s a big deal. As well as acknowledging that your level of skill is progressing, it also legitimises your dedication. You aren’t just someone who flits in and out of random sessions on a whim. You are the real deal. You are now part of the BJJ family.
It’s a fantastic achievement, a big congratulations to Poorna! But when I read Poorna’s news, I couldn’t help but feel a little winded.
Obtaining that first stripe was on my list of goals for 2023, written out and stuck to my wall above my desk last January. It’s now been almost 3 years since I had that first lesson. Did I ever get my first stripe?
No.
Because at the start of this year, I decided to quit BJJ.
My quitting wasn’t a clean break
The act of quitting actually started long before that. I found myself making excuses for not going just a few months in. Or I’d be out of the country or in town for work, with no desire to rush home to make the evening class. The teacher goes through a different move each week and if you miss a week, you’ve missed that move. I had it in my head that I was falling behind.
My attendance was sporadic. My inconsistency felt like one step forwards and two steps back. My New Moon intentions would often include, ‘I went to BJJ every week this month!’ and I did this, for a couple of months. But other students were attending three times a week and feeling like that wasn’t enough — I couldn’t commit to that kind of frequency. I didn’t go at all for the next 5 months.
‘It’s January 2023,’ I said to myself at the turn of last year. ‘Let’s start this up proper again. You enjoy the bloody thing, just go!’ The staff and teachers and everyone there were so welcoming, despite my extended absence. But I just wasn’t consistent. I wasn’t dedicated.
Then this January – rather than dragging this sorry charade out any longer, hoping something would miraculously change and berating myself when it didn’t – I gave myself permission to quit BJJ.
I wrote it in my journal. I removed the mention of BJJ from my Substack about page. I deleted the weekly recurring class reminders from my Google calendar. I accepted the loss of £80, the amount I spent upfront on classes in a futile attempt to get me to actually go.
What had been in my head for months had finally been formalised, I’d put it out into the world. I immediately felt like a weight had been lifted, I knew it was the right thing for me to do, right now.
Sometimes it’s OK to just quit
We’re taught to believe that quitting implies you couldn’t hack the thing, you didn’t give it your all. And it’s these thoughts that delayed the inevitability of me throwing in the BJJ towel. Whilst I’m not advocating dropping something at the first sign of effort, challenge or difficulty – things are always hard before they are easy – sometimes it is OK to just quit.
It’s OK to put time, energy and often money into something and then realise it’s not working for you, or you don’t actually enjoy it. It doesn’t make you a failure. It means you are someone who understands their own needs and the terrain of their internal landscape.
And in the same way a tree felled from a storm lets the light in and allows long forgotten seeds on the forest floor to germinate, getting rid of one thing can create space for something else to flourish, as
writes about in her great piece ‘Winners' Know When To Quit.But you enjoyed it, so what went wrong?
I enjoyed BJJ, yet I wasn’t going. So I thought it would be a useful exercise to unpack what led me to quit.
It wasn’t the fact I was often one of only a couple of women in a class of 20. It wasn’t the skin grazes from friction burns against the mats or the bruises that would sometimes manifest the next day. I didn’t mind any of that.
I was even kind of OK at it. I was told more than once that I had great ‘top pressure’ (shoving your shoulder into someone’s neck), that I was ‘strong’ and even managed to submit a blue belt.
And because I have quite good mobility, people would get me in holds that I’d endure with little discomfort, much to the confusion of my opponent. ‘How are you not tapping out..?’, a guy once muttered under his breath, his full weight bearing down on my concertinaed leg.
I loved being able to demonstrate that despite my small stature, I could kind of hold my own. I’d go so far as to say, I think I had potential.
But there were clearly things that weren’t working for me, which resulted in the gradual demise of my attendance to a full on resignation.
These are the things I identified.
Fixed schedules
BJJ was the first time I had ever attended an extra curricular activity with a fixed schedule outside of the home. Even though I am very much a planner, it turns out I only like to do things if I really feel like doing them in the moment itself, not work around a prescribed schedule. Maybe this is why I rarely went to University lectures…
Availability
I travel a lot, I’m not always around and I guard my ‘being’ time ferociously – any commitment that requires me to routinely show up is already on dodgy ground. I struggle with patterned regularity. This is why turning up to a place of work at a fixed time every day seems alien to me, even though I did this for years. My days need to be free from rigidity, unless I define it. Which is why working for myself really works for me, and BJJ didn’t.
Progress
In order to progress in BJJ (or anything) you need to be committed (obviously), something I couldn’t guarantee. Which meant it would take me a really long time to attain my first stripe, if at all. I found those time frames demotivating; I’d rather not do it at all. Which is why, for example, I much prefer the relatively quick results I see from resistance training (doing weights) — my muscles are more defined within weeks.
Groups
I’m not great in big groups; I’m good up to about 3-4 people. Any larger than that and I will often just go quiet and let everyone else get on with it rather than fight for airtime. Not that BJJ is a social event. But when it comes to learning new things, I work much better self-taught or having a personal teacher. Which is how I learn Spanish, in one-on-one lessons.
Somewhere else
If I have to travel to a place to do a thing, the risk of me not going is high. I love being at home and so much of my life happens there. I write, work out, grow vegetables, record radio shows and have some of my best meals at home. It means I can go from sitting at my desk to being halfway through a HIIT session within 10 minutes. I love the freedom of being able to instantly react to, ‘I want to work out right now.’ You can’t do that with classes.
Other people
BJJ is a combat sport based on grappling, ground fighting and submission holds – another person needs to be involved. Where my husband manages and plays in a football team and coaches padel tennis (which is always played in doubles), I prefer activities I can do on my own and in my own time (see solo travel: here’s why — and how — I do it), physical ones included. In return, no one is dependent on me showing up which means if I don’t feel like it, I don’t have to. The idea of a ‘gym buddy’ or running partner makes me shudder.
(Yes, I am a lone wolf.)
Other times I have quit
Making my peace with quitting BJJ and identifying the lessons I had learnt from the experience, made me think of other times in my life I have quit things.
It turns out there have been quite a few.
Head down to the comments section for this additional reading.
Quitting doesn’t mean forever
Just because I quit BJJ at this point in my life, doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to ever return to it. Perhaps I’ll take it up again, maybe in another format. Or at a different time of my life when it better slots in with whatever else I am doing.
As Poorna shared, one of her inspirations is an American lady called Betty (@bjjbetty on Instagram) who took up the sport in her 50s and became a black belt in her 60s.
There’s hope for my BJJ journey yet.
If Tom or any of the gym team happen to be reading this — you guys are lovely and AMAZING. It’s not you, it’s me. Keep up the fantastic work x