I'm a serial quitter, here's what I've learnt from it

University, beauty school, jobs, I've left them all...

You know when there’s that one bit of banter that stings you. The one jokey remark that makes you wince internally, but externally, you brush it off, laugh along and pretend you’re not doing some deep personal reflection inside.

That’s me, whenever someone brings up the fact I quit university after a day and half.

There was a period in my life, when I was so lost in terms of my future, that I signed up to things I knew I didn’t want to do, for fear of having no other plans.

University was one of them.

I remember feeling this awful sickness in my stomach, walking around Ikea, putting a colinder and saucepans in my trolley.

Everytime my mum suggested a new utensil, I so desperately wanted to tell her I didn’t want to go, but it felt like it was too late to turn back.

Honestly, there are parts of my life I have blocked out and that day and a half in uni halls, is one of them.

A mixture of shame and genuine trauma, mean I have no desire to go unpicking that now, especially not for a Substack. All I know is, that despite that, I’ve never once regretted that decision.

In fact, it wasn’t until covid, that I even wondered how different my life would be, if I’d stuck it out.

That was my first big quit.

Before that, or was it after (I’m not a very reliable narrator when it comes to timelines), I had a more minor quitting.

Once again I caved under pressure and took a job at the local chemist, which, as I type this, just sounds ridiculous.

I was out of full time education, without a clue what I wanted to do. I remember I’d just search all jobs within a 5 mile radius of my house on Indeed, because I couldn’t narrow the search based on anything else.

My role in the chemist, lasted until about 2pm the day I started. Not long after I was instructed to dust down the sanitary towels in quiet periods.

Again, agreeing to something I knew, deep down, I didn’t want to do.

The next thing I quit, was fully on my terms.

I remember being at Legal & General, with my friend Chloe opposite me (we were temping at the time).

We’d just been to the vending machine to get a bag of Walker’s Cheese & Onion crisps and a brown, plastic cup of boiling hot, but incredibly weak, hot chocolate.

I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, because working for an insurance company, when I couldn’t work out a percentage, wasn’t one of them.

Then it came to me, I can be a beauty therapist.

That was a spectacularly dumb decision by me: Enrolling in a beauty therapy course, in my early twenties, with a bunch of school leavers.

Like, hun, you just essentially enrolled yourself back into secondary school and you hated that the first time round.

I got to my NVQ Level 2, before bowing out at level 3. After a work experience day in a local salon, cemented this was not the career I wanted.

The difference between that and my other failures, is that I felt no shame about it. It didn’t work out, but at least it had been my decision to start and end it.

I think that’s why my university experience makes me so embarassed, because I never should have let it get to that point. I was just going along with what I thought I should do or what I thought would please others.

I was setting myself up for failure from the beginning. But, by the time I became a beauty school drop out, I was making decisions (albeit, not great ones) for myself, not others.

I shouldn’t even have done that day and a half at uni. Not to mention, I caused myself and my parents, more grief in the process of trying to please them.

From then on, everything I’ve quit has been on my terms, to further myself. I quit my insurance job to start work as PA to the editor at Cosmo. A decision, I really struggled with, but ultimately decided I couldn’t live with the, ‘what if’, if I didn’t.

Seven years later, I quit my dream job on the beauty team at Cosmo, because I knew I’d outgrown it and while it was a hard decision to quit the happiest job I’ve ever had, I knew it was the right one for me.

Ultimately, you have to speak up for yourself. Whether it’s a partner, parents, friend or society, you’re trying to please. I shouldn’t even have done that day and a half at uni.