Why You Should Never Give Up (Redo, Refresh, & Restart!)

One thing I used to find eerily haunting about my relationships with EUPs (Emotionally Unavailable Partners) is their seeming ability to drop the microphone, give up the ghost, and walk away from the relationship without a flinch- to discard things (people) as not important to them.

In hindsight, every time they walked away from the relationship, unbeknownst to them (and me), they were teaching me The Parable of Why You Should Never Give Up on Your Relationship with Yourself™.

On the About Love and Life Antics page, I’ve made reference to the idea that EUPs are often a mirror of our emotional unavailability.  Today, we will explore the importance of sticking with our dreams despite heartbreak and life adversity.

In line with this concept, hidden gems of truth are available to us if we unclog our ears and remain open to the message that life sends about our relationship experiences.  

These emotionally unavailable people and their jacked experiences with us are no longer meaningless pain. Instead, they transform into parables teaching us about our relationship with ourselves.

This also applies to any unfair and undeserved life burdens we encounter. These adverse experiences can help us build resilience– a key ingredient of emotional availability.

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(Side Note: This is a Flashforward Post)

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Once you courageously put the “S” on your chest (using your disappointments to grow instead of fainting on the day of your adversity), you can sort past the despair, the loss of hope, and the fear that you will never find genuine love, be happy, or accomplish your goals.

Deciding to move forward, you can continue your journey after the failure, stand back, take a beat, and breathe. This creates the space for us to do our soul work for growth and change to occur.

Change can happen when we decide to take on The Spirit of Curiosity instead of shame. The nature of curiosity is grounded in a desire to grow, not to shame ourselves for failure. Then, without self-judgment, we can identify the love and life lessons we face for the soul’s growth.

The disappointment from things not working out can be reframed as a welcome invitation for you to return HOME to YOU, focus on yourself, get inspired to rebuild your life, and hit the refresh button on your dreams and aspirations!

As I revive my writing and return to the overwhelmingly competitive blogging market (boy, how things have changed), I’ve had to do deep soul-searching. The door has swung wide open for me to examine why I stopped, not just writing, but why I’ve left many endeavors incompleted in my life. 

If it was a skill, I‘ve often perfected the art of walking away from what’s important to me; yet, clinging for dear life to crappy situations and people (to my soul’s exhaustion).  

Ironically, we will stay stuck by holding on to unhealthy situations and relationships. But in turn, we will stop believing in our hopes and dreams.

Although we know we need to let go of something because it’s as dead as an animal carcass, we try harder and resuscitate life into what’s unhealthy for us. 

We opt for staying stuck in incompatible circumstances for too long, with no long-term plan, strategy, or specific goals to create a healthier lifestyle for ourselves. 

Essentially, we will just “do our time” in a relationship, unhealthy friendship, toxic job, etc. It becomes a sort of indirect life prison sentence of our own, featuring the tagline: “It is What it Is; things Just Are the Way They Are.”  

A defeatist self-narrative seductively convinces us, “Well, you know that’s how life is. Mom and Pop (or Auntie Laura or Uncle Pete) always warned me that this is how it is in life.”

Understanding Why You Should Never Give Up on Yourself 

One reason we should never give up on our relationship with ourselves is that when we do, it forms a deeply engrained pattern of inconsistency in our life. Let me explain by sharing some of my self-reflections and personal experience.

Personal Application:

This issue has become super salient for me now with the relaunch of this blog. Was it simply that I got lost in the sauce of my transitional move from NYC to The Sunshine State and suddenly stopped pursuing what I am passionate about (writing/ blogging)?

Or, could there be a deeper meaning for why I gave up on, not just writing but, if I’m honest, many pursuits in my life that were initially important to me?

Welcome to the moment of my self-epiphany. Whoomp, there it is! (Cue song music: the 90’s rap group Tag Team. Sorry, I am a 90’s baby all day and had to go there)

Anyway, I started to curiously observe a life pattern. Historically, I would be disgruntled about EUP lovers or “friends” walking away from me and not valuing me, but why is that?

How could I assume this posture when walking away from myself by being chronically inconsistent with my goals and dreams became a pattern for me? Whenever I faced a disappointment or hardship, I would become devastated, and my motivation to pursue my plans would fizzle out. 

Oddly, I loathed when people would be inconsistent with me, but I was simply priming the pump by being hot and cold with myself. They were only mirrors of my own unfinished business. In the purest form of self-deception, I would use others’ issues as a distraction to divert from facing myself; this would leave much unhappiness.

(Sidebar: Now, we need not be too harsh on ourselves, but it’s crucial to spot self-defeating patterns in our life so we can grow.) 

We sometimes go to great lengths to avoid confronting the man (or woman) in the mirror, and we need to come clean about our own antics (Come on. Confess. Come clean. Say it with me. It’s okay. You can do it; we got this. It’s time to get free!)  

After all, if the problem is someone not giving us enough attention, perpetually treating us like gum from the bottom of their shoe, or invalidating our feelings, then it’s just THEM that needs to change, not us. Right? Wrong.

It’s human nature to focus on the outside with a “hurry up and get me out of this situation” mindset. We can be led by the misguided notion that only if a person or our circumstance will change for us and our adversity is removed, that “Voila!”, we can clap down Happy Street and live happily ever after. Not so much!

Be Honest with Yourself About Your Failures

Remember, two important themes of The Love and Life Antics Blog are exploring emotional unavailability and emotional availability. A vital component of emotional availability is consistency-not giving up on yourself despite adversity (learning to overcome our life obstacles and negative feelings).

Suppose you’re like me (the old me) and get disgruntled about your seeming “gift” to perpetually become involved with unavailable people and not get what you deserve in a relationship (a consistent, stable emotional connection)-despite seeing the signs that they are an EUP.

In that case, you need to introspect and ask, “Am I honestly being consistent with myself- pursuing my goals, my dreams, my hopes, and my aspirations despite my failures and setbacks?”

What unfinished ideas and projects have you left undone for months or maybe years? What’s that one dream or many dreams you have sidelined because of XYZ that happened (well, you can fill in the blank there)?

Listen intently to the answers that appear. It’s a tall order to expect people to provide you with what you aren’t already providing yourself- consistency, love, support, attention, nurturing, etc. You can break this inconsistency pattern by deciding to keep going with your goals despite challenges.

Yes, changing unhelpful behavioral patterns is hard work, but you can do it!

Understanding the Lateral Habenula (LHb): How Your Brain Responds to Quitting on Your Goals

Now I’m no neuroscientist, but I am a scholar at heart. While developing this post, to add some meat and potatoes, I briefly researched one of the many mechanisms in the brain’s reward pathway.

I want to share this tidbit; I believe it’s super applicable to our discussion about why you should never give up on yourself when you face adversity.

Here it goes…

According to the online journal, Advances in Neuroscience¹, our brains have a lateral habenula (LHb) mechanism. This structure is one of the many mechanisms of the limbic system (the brain’s reward pathway circuitry).

Studies of the lateral habenula originated in the 1980s. Scientists discovered that it plays a vital role in how our brain encodes aversive experiences (i.e., roadblocks, setbacks, adversities)

Another function is encoding our rewarding life experiences. Think of that great feeling you get when you achieve your heart’s desire. Also, the LHb seems to partially function as the brain’s motivation memory filing cabinet (it has some relationship with the hippocampus ²).

An interpretation of this phenomenon is that the LHb records any adversity we face when we pursue goal-orientated tasks-it stores this as information. It’s a memory bank for any rewards we did or didn’t receive when attempting to accomplish our goals.

Your Failures and Success Become Stored Memories in Your Mind

Considering the complex function of the lateral habenula, this can suggest that when we pursue or walk away from our dreams and goals, our brain keeps track of this experience and stores the memory of it, and over time, conceals it from the conscious mind-it’s a very automatic process.

Said another way, our successes and failures and the motivation (or lack of) to achieve our objectives become siloed information and get tucked away in the recesses of the mind. If you did not stick with your ambitions, seeing them through to completion, then logically, you haven’t received the reward of achieving your plans yet.

Arguably, when we give up, our spiritual higher-self can call us back to our dream or goal because the memory of our unaccomplished desire remains deeper in our soul.

To add, our spiritual self (formed by The Creator) still desires for us to complete what’s been left unfinished.

Could it be that the disappointment and dissatisfaction you may feel about giving up on your goals is your soul calling out to you, empowering you to transform the frustration into motivation to revisit and achieve them?

It’s calling for you to redo, hit the refresh button on your life, restart, and fulfill those dead dreams. Instead of resuscitating unhealthy relationships and situations, we must reserve that energy and perform CPR on our most minor and significant goals.

Nature reminds us about our unfilled dreams via our biological mechanism- the lateral habenula (LHb). The brain says, ” Hmm…I will remind them that their dream is still not fulfilled yet, and they need to put their hands back on the plow to be successful one day.”  Say thank you to your LHb (lateral habenula)!

Feelings of discontentment, agitation, dissatisfaction, and longing for something better in life are signals for you. Our very biology is hard-wired to want to attain our goals even if eventually we decide it’s not worth the trouble or if we quit because we stop believing in ourselves.

If you’ve thrown in the towel, you need to go back and redo, refresh and restart! Your LHb is calling you back to purpose. Your brain has “all rights reserved” for you to bounce back after failures.This would explain my rebooting Love and Life Antics-The Love and Life Blog (formerly Love Antics).

My brain, soul, and spirit are “calling me out,” (God is too) reminding me that I have unfinished business to complete as a blogger/writer/content publisher. Also, I’m hatching my plan to pursue a new career path in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  

At 37 years old, and after 7.5 years in the same career, I realize there is more to my life, and my growth is not done yet. Yes, I am good at what I currently do career-wise, but I realize I have given all I can; I have other passions that I am renewing and reviving.

A Real Life Example of Never Giving Up: What We Can Learn From Tennis Star Ashleigh Barty

Similar to this experience in March 2022, tennis star Ashleigh Barty seemingly walked away from being number one in the world at the height of her career. But did she really walk away? The tennis world was shocked. Sports media demanded that she explain herself, “Why are you retiring at 25?” they wondered.

(Sidebar: I’ve been a tennis aficionado since age 11, so this example made sense.)

In an online interview article feature by Sportskeeda.com she replied, “There was a part of me that wasn’t quite satisfied, wasn’t quite fulfilled…success for me is knowing that I’ve given absolutely everything I can…Now I want to chase after some other dreams.” ³

And, there you have it. Sometimes our dreams can change, and as we evolve, we can give ourselves permission to honor this shift. She was not giving up on herself but honoring her heart which called for change. Despite her fame and money, it didn’t matter and she did not want to be stuck.

This is another life lesson. You can be good at something (a career or job) but fall out of love with it. If that happens, we don’t need to stay until there is nothing left.

Instead, moving forward, we may need to develop a plan to renew our objectives and not be afraid to pursue new dreams and the old ones that may have died.

I have decided to head the call of change, and so can you! I invite you to join me! These ideas are radical, I know.

3 Hidden Consequences of Resigning Your Dreams

When you quit and never return to pursuing your dream, that decision comes with costs that add up over time, and one day, regret can set it (if you let it). The following three items are consequences when we walk away from our dreams. I share some from personal experience.

1. In the long-term, you can miss out on experiencing the fruit of your labors because you became impatient with the short-term discomfort of dealing with adversity

• For example, as I rebuild this blog, I often review my Gmail inbox for the former Love Antics blog. Upon rummaging through the inbox, I found many old emails from editors contacting me about my content and wanting to collab. One of them was an old email from the blogging manager of TheAnatomyofLove.com. He had somehow found the blog organically on the web and contacted me requesting to guest post on my blog Love Antics.

• This was a big deal, but I didn’t realize it at the time. If you don’t know anything about TheAnatomyofLove.com, it’s run by two Ph.D.-level founders and is a high-authority blog in the relationship niche. Go figure, two Ph. Ds reaching out to little ole’ me to do a content collaboration-this was an honor.

• I recently looked at their traffic and they get about 83k visitors per month (jaw drop).  However, at the time, I was still too inconsistent with things in my life and missed out on that opportunity because at that time I started to fizzle out, write less, and checked my emails less.

• I am not feeling sorry for myself, and if you “missed out” on some things, you shouldn’t either! The milk is spilled. It’s time to buy some new milk. We can use the failed opportunities that have slipped our grasp as inspiration to create new ones. 

2. By walking away from your gift, calling, or vision, you are NOT valuing yourself, and you don’t realize the potential of what you have. Down the road, the sting of regret can bite.

• Here’s another personal application I’ll share with you. In May 2022, when I attempted to repurchase my old domain loveantics.com from Bluehost (I let it expire in 2019), I was informed that it was up for auction and that my expired domain (which was pretty unique and memorable because it was short and sweet) is now up for sale for a whopping $3595. 

• You may know much about Web real estate, but that’s not a shabby price for a domain name and brand I created. In May 2022, I had to get creative when I committed to relaunching the blog. I opted for loveandlifeantics.com. I’m not paying over 3k to own back my expired domain name. No Ma’am/Sir! Bump that! 

• What was the life lesson for me? Well, I did not value what I had created or understand its value at the time. I threw in the towel too soon and was not consistent with things. I now realize that I must build my tolerance for frustration and discomfort when facing roadblocks and stress.

3. You inadvertently communicate to other people that you don’t believe in yourself; if you don’t believe in yourself, why should others trust and believe in you?

• A faithful and dependable person is like a refreshing sip of water on a hot and humid day in The Sunshine State (Florida). Dependability builds trust. Reliability starts with having our own back in troubled times. If we can do that, then we are modeling we can do the same for others too. If you’re not a fair-weather friend to yourself, you model that you likely won’t be to other people. 

Devotion To Your Aspirations Despite Life’s Adversity Is an Ingredient of Emotional Availability

When I started blogging about emotional unavailability, a significant focus was spent on understanding the behavior of EUPs (Emotionally Unavailable Partners/People). Yes, this insight is still invaluable- it helps to break unhealthy relationship patterns.

However, cultivating greater emotional availability yourself is a surefire antidote for combating emotional unavailability. Not running away from ourselves during adversity signifies we are becoming more emotionally available.

Still, let’s keep it Real-T (Truth). If Google led you here and you are reading this, if you’re like me, you may have given up on yourself amid a trial you faced or may be encountering now.

Maybe over the last few months, years, or longer, you got distracted and lost the motivation to complete your goals. Perhaps it was a failed relationship, friendship, or a toxic work environment zapping your energy (or whatever).

It’s time for a mental and emotional shift. You can/we can learn to redo, refresh, and restart what you’ve left unfinished on your journey. You must understand the power of not giving up and hold on to the reasons to keep going.

How The Redo, Refresh, and Restart Philosophy™ Can Help You Develop A Never Give Up Attitude

Achieving success begins in your mind first, with the three R’s. Think of this as a three-element philosophical shift about reviving your dead dreams.

1. Commit to REDO, the goal you walked away from. This means doing things over again but differently. This can be called the “learning it over again phase.”

• A. When your mindset is to REDO, you repeat pursuing your goal with new knowledge acquired and apply new strategies and tactics. –the commitment is the learning process.
  • Focusing on the worldly benchmarks of success becomes less of a priority (e.g., praise and recognition, more YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter social media followers, money, status, and power). 
  • Of course, these would be good “add-ons,” but pleasing people can’t be your sole focus when resurrecting your dreams. 

• B. Your primary focus during the learning phase is the action steps to break your pattern of inconsistency and improve the quality of your relationship with yourself. 
  • Are you beating yourself up? 
  • How about being impatient with your progress? 
  • Are you insisting your success happens NOW, or else you will flip out and lose your cool? (insert: face with steam and furrowed brow emoji, and you fill in the blank here)
  • Do you have compassion for the many (perhaps unfair) adversities you’ve faced that hindered your fulfillment? 

2. Decide to REFRESH and breathe new life into your aspirations. This phase is the inspiration part of the equation, where you become your cheerleader and learn to encourage yourself. 

• A. When you press the refresh button on your hopes, your self-narrative changes from “It’s too late” to “The time to repair my broken dreams is Now. Let’s go!”

• B. When you refresh, you are re-motivating yourself and allowing the blood of courage to pump through your veins. You quicken yourself to start over again.

3. Take action and RESTART! This phase is considered the action phase.

• A. It’s like rebooting a computer after all the necessary updates have been downloaded for optimal performance.
  • You’ve already decided to redo your goals, commit to the learning process, and cultivate a healthy relationship with yourself.

• B. Secondly, you’ve made the decision to refresh your heart’s desire (the good ones are put there by God).

• C. Thirdly, you restart by taking incremental actionable steps toward your objectives, daily and over time, without the need to rush your progress.

• D. Once upon a time, you may have let heartbreak, failure, impatience, and inconsistency get you off track (and shut you down), but now you reboot yourself by pressing the restart button on your life and re-upload the dream you’ve been putting on hold!

Wrapping Things Up:

Sometimes we can get off of our course in life. You may have hit your version of rock bottom. These adversities may have sidetracked you from your purpose and passions. However, let this only be temporary. If you hit rock bottom, the only place to go is up!

What have been your triggers for losing your mojo? Was it losing yourself in an unhealthy relationship, the soul-evaporating effects of a toxic job, unhealthy friendships, or maybe the self-defeating thought that you’re too old to pursue your gifts?

Whatever they are you hopefully now realize why you should never give up on yourself-NEVER!

Instead, choose the options to redo, refresh and restart! Cheers to your success! It’s hard work at first, but you got this!

What hopes and dreams do you need to revive?

Don’t let an unhealthy relationship, a EUP, or a toxic work environment distract you from the great things you were put on earth to accomplish!

Remember, no matter what you are going through, you are never alone!

Has this article blessed you?

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References:

1. Marc Fakhoury, Sergio Domínguez López, “The Role of Habenula in Motivation and Reward”, Advances in Neuroscience, vol. 2014, Article ID 862048, 6 pages, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/862048

2. Habenula. (2022, July 25). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habenula

3. (n.d). Retrieved July 5, 2022, from https://www.sportskeeda.com/tennis/news-why-ashleigh-barty-retired-age-25-the-truth-behind-world-no-1-s-shock-retirement