QUITTING GUILT
Susan Shapiro

“I've spent the last two years saying no.

I have declined invitations for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinners, drinks and coffee dates. I vetoed anniversary soirees, charity benefits, graduations, consecrations, and the bar and bat-mitzvahs of my friends' children. I steered clear of kiddie birthday parties for my nieces, nephews and cousins. I turned down assignments from clients I used to chase, rejected free business trips I was offered, and refused to read manuscripts that aspiring scribes sent me unsolicited. I chose not to join my in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner, Passover seders, or to break fast on Yom Kipper. I ended a writing workshop with twenty-five members where I'd been the literary den mother for almost two decades. Additionally I said goodbye to the guilt that goes along with giving up roles one has outgrown.

In that same time frame, I also nixed a twenty-seven-year two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, quit alcohol, dope, gum and bread –and dropped seventeen pounds. I sold three nonfiction books, enhanced my second career as a writing teacher, greatly increased my income, made my first real estate investment, and fell madly in love with my husband, Aaron, again…”

Susan Shapiro is the Manhattan-based author of Five Men Who Broke My Heart and Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except For Sex, recently published by Delacorte Press. She lives with her husband in Greenwich Village, where she currently teaches writing at NYU and The New School.