You make a good point there. I think that if your feelings are telling you something, they tend to be consistent and fairly strong.

Great idea for a blog post

Another point I would like to add would be – make sure if you’re making a decision based upon your feelings/intuition that it really is your intuition and not something dodgy like laziness.

Intuitively, I feel like it was, though the logical parts of me don’t seem to think so. But, I’ll try trust myself with this and see how it goes!

Thanks for sharing your experience. If you’re happier now than you were before, that sounds to me like it was a successful choice?

When I wanted to leave school at least temporarily, my parents were quite resistant (and with reason – I still live under their roof, after all, and I felt guilty for freeloading). Even though they knew that I’d done nothing in school for years and that I was miserable, they didn’t want me to leave because with the recession, I’d “never be able to get a job”, especially with all the college graduates having trouble. I just couldn’t cope with going even part time and I just wanted out.

Five months after putting my foot down, while I don’t think they’d ever say that leaving was a good idea, they have commented on how much happier I’ve been, and I must say, I’ve learned more in the last five months than the years I spent in school. I’m still unsure and fearful as to where I go from here, and I still sometimes feel guilty, but I’m very glad I at least took a break. I’ve learned a lot of patience with myself, and now when I relapse, it’s usually quite rarely, whereas in the beginning I was constantly angry with myself and depressed.

I think the most important things I’ve learned when it came to issues like this it’s that I know I always have a choice, even when I feel like I “have” to do something, and that all I have to do is stand my ground until the other person gives up on telling me what I should do. Remembering why I was doing it helped a lot, when it got bad. Actually, that last sentence was probably the thing I needed to do most, and helped with the guilt and shame. (I need to write it down and stick it somewhere I can see often.)

Thanks for posting this.