On Not Giving Up

I suppose there is a way to divide people. Those who will at some point give up. And those who won't.

As a parent, it's very enjoyable to see, for example, my two middle kids' approaches to puzzles. They sell these puzzles at Barnes and Noble where you might have to, for example, figure out how to disentangle these. My kids will get puzzles that "should" take them a half-hour to figure out, give or take, based on the "rating" they are given on the box (level of difficulty). Neither one will pay attention to that, and will do it in less than 30 seconds. So obviously, they need harder puzzles. So I buy harder ones. Which they solve in ridiculously short amounts of time (but more than 30 seconds, say). But the key is that they don't ever give up. They've yet to be stumped . . . but they would never assume a puzzle was impossible.

I look at the six-month Naked Strike. I could have caved at month four. But to me, every problem is a creative solution just waiting to be discovered. I found a way for Management to, for now, come out the winner in the strike. It involved a lot of cunning on my part. But Demon Baby has taught me a thing or two about relentlessness.

On a more serious note, when I was very ill, at first the doctors told me my condition was hopeless. "We've done all we could," was one doctor's response to how bad my Crohn's disease was. "The best you can hope for is short periods of remission someday." At the time, I couldn't walk because of a steroid myopathy. And I was in pain. Crazy blow-your-brains out pain. And I said, out loud, "I give up." Because I had. My significant other looked down at me and said, "You don't get that option. You have a child." Well, that slapped the "give up" out of me. My family's approach wasn't give up--it was find a doctor who wouldn't. When I moved away from my saintly doctor and came to Virginia, I went to two doctors who told me I needed to go back on some pretty rough Crohn's drugs. My instinct was . . . screw Western medicine. Which led me to my acupuncturist and a different approach, which has led to a two-year (for me) record-breaking remission. Even life's most difficult battles are just waiting for solutions, as long as you don't give up.

Last night, in my real life, I was reminded again why gossip is poison and judgmental people make me want to puke. It reminds me of how this biz can be sometimes. "No one" is selling anything, "no one" is buying anything. It's almost like gossip, just this undercurrent of negativity whispering through the air. I look at the current publishing crisis as just a solution waiting to happen. I ponder, with two books I am toying with, are these unique enough (!!) to make a publisher say, "Now THIS is a unique and wondrous enough book that I could get behind it even in these times."

Giving up in 2009 is not an option.

Thoughts?