You Know What? I Quit.

You know what?
I quit.
There — I said it.
No trembling lip,
no dramatic violin swelling in the background,
just my voice,
flat, exhausted,
with the weight of a thousand paper cuts.

It didn’t start this way.
Of course not.
It started with a notebook.
With a dream.
With coffee that went cold beside the page
because I was too caught up in imagining futures.
With friends who said things like
“Wow, that’s brave,”
and “You’re really going for it, huh?”

I was.

I did.

And then —
then came the edits,
the feedback,
the algorithms,
the hustling-for-likes culture
where my soul became content,
and my content became currency.
Then came the waiting.
Then came the no’s.
The ghostings.
The vague rejections that read
like they were copied and pasted
from a graveyard of someone else’s dreams.

“You know what? I quit.”
But not because I failed.
Not because I couldn’t make it.
Not even because I was bad.
I quit because I lost track
of who I was doing it for.

There was a time
I would write with dirt beneath my fingernails,
with a scraped knee,
with a tongue stained purple from berries I didn’t ask permission to eat,
and my stories would burst out
like fireflies in a jar just opened.

Now?
Now I censor my metaphors.
I Google “trending themes.”
I pause mid-sentence to check if my character is “relatable enough”
for a market that wants trauma,
but only the digestible kind.
Grief, but with good lighting.
Sadness, but never inconvenient.
Anger, only if it ends in redemption.

You know what?
I quit because
I refuse to wring my heart out
for approval that only lasts a scroll’s length.

I quit the chase.
The endless submissions.
The careful crafting of cover letters that open with
“Dear Editor,”
when I don’t even know if they’ll read past the salutation.

I quit asking for permission
to be the storyteller I already am.

Let me tell you something:
quitting is not always surrender.
Sometimes it’s choosing your own damn peace.

Sometimes it’s standing up in the middle of a meeting,
buttoning your coat with shaky hands,
and walking out,
not because you don’t care —
but because you care too much
to keep pretending.

I’m not bitter.
God, that’s the line they love to use, isn’t it?
The bitter artist,
sipping cold coffee,
ranting on blogs.
No.
I am not bitter.
I am awake.

I see now
that this industry will gladly take your voice,
so long as you use it to sell what it already understands.
It will hand you templates
and call it mentorship.
It will dress up mediocrity with marketability,
and ask you to do the same.

So — I quit.
I quit molding myself
into palatable shapes.
I quit turning pain into profit
just because that’s what performs.

And I know —
they’ll say I’m giving up.
They’ll say,
“But if you stop now, how will anyone ever hear you?”
But what they don’t get is:
I’m not going silent.
I’m going sovereign.

I will write
without the white noise of strategy.
I will write for the ones
who read with their hands on their hearts,
not their thumbs on the share button.

I will write
for the joy of a sentence that surprises me,
for the whisper of characters that show up uninvited,
for the scent of ink on my fingers,
reminding me that I am real,
and I am enough
without applause.

You know what?
I quit —
and in that quitting,
I reclaim.

I reclaim the space where wonder lives.
I reclaim my voice from the pit of comparison.
I reclaim the child who once told a story to the wind
and believed, without a shadow of doubt,
that it would be carried somewhere that mattered.

I don’t need your likes.
I don’t need your gatekept stages.
I don’t need to trend, to brand, to optimize.
I just need
a blank page,
a quiet hour,
and the courage
to say what I came here to say —
unfiltered,
unpolished,
true.

You know what?
I quit.

And I’ve never felt more free.

#WritersLife
#IQuitCulture
#ReclaimYourVoice
#Unfiltered
#NoMorePerfection
#WriteForYourself
#ArtisticLiberation