This is a question I’ve been asking myself for awhile now. It’s something I’ve only had to give a lot of thought to maybe twice before in my life, both times when I felt I was getting less out of something than the amount of time and effort I was putting in.

It’s a question I avoid answering, because the truth of the matter is, I hate quitting. I hate feeling like I’ve let others down, like I’ve shirked commitments or obligations, or like I haven’t stuck with something long enough to see if I could turn the situation around.

But there is a point when you have to answer that question of whether or not it’s in your best interest to quit. You have to look in the mirror and acknowledge that your feelings of continual exhaustion or frustration or under-appreciation, or any combination of the three, are valid. To get to this point of acknowledgement though, it usually takes an inciting incident, something that really just pushes you over the edge.

My inciting incident happened a few weeks ago. It was around one or two in the morning, much later than I had planned to go to sleep, and I was literally looking at my exhausted reflection as I washed off, technically, yesterday’s makeup so that I could get in bed, trying to be as quiet as possible so as not to wake up my roommate, who had gone to sleep probably two hours before. I was so mad at myself; I had planned only to start that week’s article, around maybe 10:30 or 11, and be in bed by midnight. Obviously, that hadn’t happened; I had worked much longer and was still far from done. Yeah, that can happen, and often does, with different projects or work in college. The thing is, it was far from the first time that I had tacked on working on an article to the end of my already-long homework to-do list, after getting home from work, knowing that I was headed back to work the next day.

My resistance to give up writing for Odyssey before now has stemmed from how great of an opportunity it is. I went from seeing all those cool articles and listicles on Facebook and thinking, “I want to write that stuff,” to getting to do it. I’ve been able to write articles that had the potential to blow up to a few hundred, even few thousand shares (though I never got quite that far). I’ve had the freedom to write about any given topic, in any approach that I want. It has allowed me a solid platform to express myself creatively, and at times more journalistically about current events I care about, and I’m very grateful for that. I won’t ever regret this experience, and part of me already misses it. But the time has come for me to worry about my personal priorities, and I realized after that night that they need adjusting.

I know that ending my contribution to Odyssey won’t mean that I won’t ever have all-nighters (I am in college), but the point is that I need to choose what’s worth spending so much time on, and that I also need to be realistic about how much time I have. Like I said, I have to prioritize. It’s busy enough as a student with two other jobs. Also, as a creative writing major, there is a large amount of writing I’m already doing for class, and otherwise, and to be frank, that’s more important to me. I want to have more time to focus on the actual art that I want to create and build my own personal platform to present it to the world.

I also need sleep, and less pressure from myself. I’m a perfectionist, so everything that I’m involved in, I try to do to the best of my ability. Spending so many hours a week on an article, be it a simple idea for the sake of meeting the weekly deadline or a piece I’m really passionate about, just doesn’t fit into my schedule. Not a healthy one, anyway.

Again, I’m sad to leave my amazingly talented team of Odyssey writers here at Columbia. I will definitely continue to read Odyssey and share the relatable and relevant content, so simply, and still eloquently, presented to social media.

I hope that this article has provided one last bit of inspiration or advice to anyone reading it. The moral to this story is to do what's best for you because your happiness is most important at the end of the day.