My husband was a brilliant graphic designer, a humble guy whose Instagram was filled with photos of our baby and me instead of a carefully curated gallery of his work. My father was a brilliant writer who supported our family by writing infomercials (seriously) instead of publishing the novels he’d started when we were young. Both of them died with unrealized dreams and untapped potential, with whole worlds of unseen possibility inside of them. Aaron, father to our toddler son, was 35. I got brave because in just a few weeks, when I was 31, I watched my father and my husband die of cancer. I got brave by just deciding to be brave and change my life. But overall, I was an expert at being who people expected me to be, at doing what they expected me to do. I’d quit a job - with sweaty palms and pit stains - if I had another one lined up. The “brave” things that I did do always came with a safety net: I’d break up with a boy if I had another waiting on the back burner. I spent years working at marketing jobs where Sunday nights felt like walking the plank, knowing the next day, I’d be jumping into an ocean of PowerPoints nobody would ever read and email chains where the act of CCing certain people was a political move, and dealing with the egos of men who believed their dog food ads were truly an art. I have been in multiple relationships that lasted years longer than they should have because breaking it off seemed more difficult than just waiting for a boy I had no interest in to lose interest in me. ![]() I played basketball until junior year not because I loved it, but because I was tall, and I didn’t know how to tell people that I hated all the pushing and rather would have spent that time just reading. This fear of quitting meant that I did a lot of things that I didn't like doing. ![]() Quitting was probably the worst thing you could do, according to most motivational posters hanging in our gym locker rooms. Like nearly all of us, I was not raised to be a quitter. Just kidding, but now that Britney song will be in your head all day. ![]() This is a story about a girl named Lucky. This is not a story about how I quit my job to travel the world and scrub toilets in paradise, and how I’ve never been happier and our cubicles are coffins and you deserve an unconventional life that brings you bliss.
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