Well, you tried your best....is a useless phrase

Unless you are calling yourself by the second person, looking in a mirror, and saying it to yourself.

I don't think it works very well coming from anyone else. I think the only person who can really decide to give something up is the person doing the giving up. And that in order to be able to say "I tried my best" and have some semblance of peace about a tough decision, one you've been wishing like mad you didn't have to make, I think you really need to feel like you tried your best.

At least I do.

Which is where we get to some advice on how to help me make tough decisions, especially if you think I should go and I keep wanting to stay. Be it going away from my first PhD program, getting out of depression with medication, or right now, stopping breast feeding.

The thing about me is, I actually do have a point where I say enough is enough. And I can forgive myself, or the world, or whoever I need to, to be at peace. Like with my C-section. I tried my best to have a natural birth, 17 hours of excruciating back pain (the baby's skull was turned towards my spine), with massage and hand pressure from M, with 2 hours of laughing gas and screaming until I was hoarse and almost passed out, then with an epidural, and when that didn't take on the left side, moving it, upping the pain medication, and finally agreeing to a C-section with a local instead of being forced to have one under general anethesia if another 2 hours of pushing on a local drug hadn't worked. So I tried my best. That was it. I wish it had gone differently, but I tried my best. A modicum of peace is mine.

And with the PhD. I went until I was depressed and had to start medication. At that point, I knew I'd tried as much as I had in me. Done.

And now I'm here with breast feeding. But I don't yet feel like I got to try my best. Like I got to give everything I have and still have it fail and be able to walk away at peace. Sure, someone else may be able to walk away without having gone through it, but that isn't how I work. I know this about myself.

I think that many other people are like this, too. They need to feel like they tried their best, in a rough relationship, at a job, in any pursuit which they know it might be time to give up, which their brain tells them is too much, but which their heart hasn't been able to let go of.

So I think that the best thing to do to help me, and people like me, when you see them trying to make a really tough decision and holding on to the option you really think is too hard, and for which you are completely ready to forgive them, is to remember that it is more important that they be able to forgive themselves.

Let them try their best. With that boyfriend you hate, or in that job you think is sucking them dry. Or with breastfeeding a tense, screaming baby who has to be bounced upright to start latching. Unless you've made the same decision in the past, you kind of can't play that role for them.

So I started writing this 3 days ago. Kind of lost any further thoughts, cause that was some 36 feedings (bottle and breast) ago.