Voted off the island
Voted off the island is a marriage rule from So You Married a Human by Jackie Kelley about giving yourself permission to quit a bad day rather than push through it and take the whole household down with you.
In Jackie's words
Hi, it’s me, your realist buddy reminding you that if you have already fallen down seven times today, maybe you should just stay down. If you dropped and shattered your wife’s favorite mug and your baby is teething and your dog pooped on the living room carpet and you just found out that your insurance won’t cover your dental filling and you just got a super-annoying text from your boss, then like, give up. It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.
We’ve all had days that are so laughably hard that it feels like the entire universe is conspiring against us. Days where one step forward is twelve steps back and the urge to scream into the abyss is, at times, overwhelming. From one human to another, let me tell you that on those days, it is almost always better to give up than to keep pushing forward. Because when we continue to push headfirst through obstacle after obstacle without taking the time to recoup, we inevitably burn out like a dying star. A brilliant, beautiful, on fire, destructive, dying star that blows up the entire galaxy on its way out. (I’m not a scientist. I have a degree in social work. Please don’t come for me.)
If you happened to be raised anything like I was, you may have also had a parent who blindly pushed through bad feelings and crappy situations regardless of the effect on their personal mental, emotional, or physical condition, or those of their family members. I have vivid memories of horrible days made progressively more horrible because my parent was seemingly incapable of cutting their losses and trying again later. Literally, our family mantra was a list of five rules, and the last one was “Never give up.” This means that now, as an adult, the idea of quitting makes me feel like an overwhelming failure. It feels like laziness. It feels like incapability, irresponsibility, and generally bad vibes. When I’m faced with my limit, instead of taking a step back, I tend to push through and take my entire household down with me.
Hey, I never claimed to be perfect.
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