There are times when the most liberating thing you can do is to give up.
I keep deceiving myself. I tell myself that I’m finished trying to “save” others. I know it’s a waste of time and emotional energy to keep trying to save people who don’t want to be saved. People who don’t believe they need to be saved.
It’s ridiculous. It’s even arrogant of me. And it’s exhausting.
But I keep slipping back into the habit anyway, and I feel like a fool. I find that I’m not saving anyone — and I’m destroying myself by giving myself false hope that change might be coming. The truth is that change isn’t coming. Nobody is going to listen. And I need to save myself — instead of trying to become a hero by saving someone else.
When I look at reality, I see so much which is going to hurt people — some who I’ve loved, some who I’ll never know — and I want to scream in frustration that what I see isn’t obvious to those others. I was once naive enough to believe that if I just explained carefully why people were putting themselves at risk, they would eagerly make changes in their own lives.
What I find is that many people will admit — in the abstract — that they badly need change, but then they’re unwilling to do anything about it once they realize there’s a price to be paid.

Grief keeps reopening the door my loving mother walked out of
Why do we stay in prison when there’s no lock holding us there?
What can a free society do before an unstable person commits a crime?
Looking for the Boston scapegoat? You’ll never find perfect security
Who ‘owns’ children? And who should step in when parents fail?
All sides rushing to assign blame in theater shootings only leads to error
Life is like flying a plane as you assemble it from a box of parts
Hypocritical Republicans wimp out on free market when politics calls
Death of classmate from past feels like a reminder to change my life