I did something really scary and dangerous today. I let myself quit.
It’s the second day of my Month-of-Pickup, an intensive course correction aimed towards making myself extraverted and social again.
Yesterday was the first day. My friend and I set a goal of doing eight approaches each. We did it just as the mall closed, running around frantically looking for girls to approach. I was scared going in, but left feeling good.
Today we set the goal of approaching ten girls in two hours. I knocked out the first two quickly, then shuffled around for an hour making excuses. When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to do the full ten, I let myself off easily and only did one more.
Three measly approaches in three hours. I’m just reacclimatizing myself to approaching, so I leave shortly after opening. That means that in a two hour “pick up session”, I was actually talking to girls for about fifteen minutes, and making excuses for an hour and forty-five.
I should have risen to the challenge and started running around racking up the tally. I didn’t. I let myself quit.
I’ve quit relationships because it was the right thing to do. I quit school because I didn’t want what it promised. I quit a job.
That’s all fine, because I was living up to my own standards, but when I quit something that I deliberately design for myself, that’s a problem. Usually when I say I’m going to do something, I do it. Today I weaseled out.
I’m writing about this today because it’s the only thing I can think about, because it’s a useful idea to chew on, but also as punishment to myself. When there’s a breach of internal trust, there needs to be consequences. One of them is publicly exposing my failure.
Beyond building a negative association to prevent similar action in the future, I don’t believe in dwelling on mistakes, so I’m going to let this one go. The important thing is ensuring that it won’t happen again.
Tomorrow, I will hand $500 to my friend, with instructions to keep it if I don’t meet my goal for the day. He’s a good enough friend that he would do it, too. I’ll continue to do this every single day this month that we have goals entirely under my own control.
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Between pickup and working on SETT, I’m probably not going to have much time or headspace for anything else. Apologies in advance if you aren’t interested in pickup, because it’s probably all I’ll be writing about this month.
Photo is some broken glass in an abandoned building in Berlin.
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