There is a time and a place. You want to moan about someone or something? It’s probably better to vent in private and then decide whether you want to take that frustration into a more public place. Consider, is it worth it? Is the battle really necessary? Or is it perhaps better to ‘give up’?
Giving up is not a sign of weakness. It shows that you are strong enough to let go. We all face challenges in life from parking tickets to speeding fines, work place issues to financial struggles, and much worse besides. It’s how you deal with the hurdles which are placed in your way which either make or break you. Do you see Tiffany Porter giving up after crashing over the line and finishing fifth in the 100m hurdles final in Beijing? No. Did Nelson Mandela give up when he was incarcerated for 27 years? No.
However, there are times when giving up is a good thing. You can lose the battle, but win the war. In baseball, you don’t have to hit every ball or win every game to win the series.
More often than not, we don’t give up at FWL. Terriers to the end, we dig until we can’t dig any more….. sometimes into the wee small hours (like now!). Often the work we do is anything but easy. If it was, it wouldn’t take a specialised team to deal with it! But, there sometimes comes a point when we have to say ‘enough is enough’. We can’t make birth parents reply to our letters, the same as we cannot magic up documentary evidence to support family myth/legend.
The number of Long Lost Family stories and celebrity family histories on Who Do You Think You Are? which are left on the cutting room floor and never make it to the televised series …. must go into the hundreds in every series. Are the research teams deterred by the occasional brick wall? Definitely not!
Giving up is OK. Be strong and let it go…..
