Quitting, for me was always the safe bet. I have walked away from many things that I felt were too risky in terms of success. For most of my adult life I felt as if immediate improvement or achievement was necessary for success. And the moment I began to struggle, I tipped my hat and moved onto something else.
The word success is equivocal in nature, so I’ll explain what I mean when I use it. Success, the way I see it, is attaining the feeling of competitiveness, not superiority. I don’t particularly enjoy the idea of being at ‘the top.’ Truthfully, the attention I assume exists there frightens me unbelievably and my constitution doesn’t require or feel pacified if I out-perform others. It does, however, enjoy the competition. Not to seem too idealistic or simplistic, success for me was meeting a challenge and overcoming. Oh, and being able to afford fancy cheese gets filed somewhere in my mind-map of success.
Until I began gardening I hadn’t fully experienced failure, but neither overwhelming success. I existed blissfully in the middle, doing fine. It occurs to me now that the only real way to overcome, to succeed, is to drink the sweet tonic of failure (and a lot of it). It’s a cocktail of mistakes, loss, disappointment, disillusionment, revival, and perseverance. This was something that no one had ever conveyed to me, and I’m not sure anyone is equipped to truly teach that lesson.
With gardening, I was green. I had not seen the plant cycle through cycle, I had not worked with any of the equipment to know where the dangers or ineffectiveness could be disastrous. I was inept and ignorant in about every aspect of this undertaking, yet I was determined, powered by some form of ignorance. My exact motivations are increasingly foggy as I reflect on this start-up period. It’s hard to say why I didn’t quit, in my usual shallow bow and slow exit sort of way, when failure after failure presented itself to me.
Why did I not tap out when powdery mildew suffocated my plants as I doted helplessly on them? Or when my exhaust fan fell from the wall, ripping away the ducting from my lights, and caused the heat to swell to above 110 degrees? Or when I plugged in a dehumidifier to an extension chord unequipped to handle the load and almost started the downstairs carpet on fire? (Mind: this was just the first two months).
I suppose l was oblivious to how bad things were really going, or maybe it was denial; probably both. Either way, it’s the only way I can explain why I didn’t quit. If I was looking over the shoulder of that girl in her one car garage with those three lights, I may have politely suggested accepting that grad school offer. But I wasn’t and was left to continue quixotically onward.