External measures cannot control our hearts, minds, nor souls.

We control those.

So.

Be you. Without apology.

And, maybe, in your thriving, external success will come.

If so, it’s gravy.

If not, it’s life.

But it is your life.

Be brave enough to live it.

You have sought permission for far too long.

Stand up, Recalibrate, Grow, and Evolve. Explode into you.

Why do we quit?

How do we redeem ourselves and thrive after quitting?

Why we Quit

I have asked these questions while writing my book, One Day a Lion, forthcoming in 2026.

I have experienced both failure and redemption enough times to feel myself an expert, but the thriving continues to elude me. I do not feel alone here, however, as it appears I have plenty of company.

Semantics are important. So what does it mean, after all, to thrive? And, more importantly, what does it look like?

-- Money?

-- Fame?

-- Influence?

-- Happiness?

As a practicing attorney, I spent most of my time inside a courtroom, watching the judicial system where it served the people. Some lawyers dressed in three-piece suits, some in blazers and khakis. The attorneys in the three-piece suits, those who drove the Mercedes, the ones whose outward appearances indicated they were thriving, often practiced law in ways I would not.

As a cog in the corporate grinder, I spent most of my time compromising, negotiating, and problem-solving. My days passed in windowless boardrooms, watching PowerPoint slides, drinking stale coffee, and eating Dunkin’ Donuts. I frequently watched professionals rise through the ranks for reasons I failed to understand. Connections helped. Creating value helped. But ultimately, I failed to find the thing in me that most successful corporate risers found in themselves. Worse yet, I could not decipher what, exactly, that thing even was.

Like the successful executives I encountered, I worked hard. I created value. I took advantage of opportunities when presented. However, I frequently set myself ablaze so that others might stay warm. Meaning, I willingly did the jobs of three, frequently doing my boss’s job, too. And I watched those around me rise, sometimes meteorically, while my own progress proved meager in comparison.

And why? What’s the cause? And how many others feel the same?

Leverage and the Illusion of Fair Exchange

I have, thankfully, had the opportunity to consider these questions in depth for the past six months. And I have reached a conclusion. I wonder how many of you may find the conclusion useful when applying it to your own circumstances.

Personal life – and especially professional life – consists of leveraged relationships. One wants a thing that another can provide. It is challenging to think of any relationship that is not leveraged.

Football players have coaches who can help with recruiters. Judges and attorneys exchange justice for truth. In corporate life, your peers can facilitate or inhibit your upward mobility.

In marriage, partners control access to intimacy and emotional support. Parents teach and protect children, and the child’s life performance becomes the scorecard by which parental success is measured.

Exchanges in levered relationships are expected, acceptable, and reasonable for all involved – a system of controls in which we give and another takes, in which we take and another gives.

However, at times, the give and take can be levered in an unfair way. At such moments, we can accept the unfairness as a necessary hurdle, or we can refuse the leverage and break the system with our refusal to participate.

Society is arranged in such a way that accepting the leverage is considered winning, and refusing the leverage is losing. It must be so. If society celebrated quitters, then unnecessary refusals would proliferate across relationships, governments, and industries.

Therefore, acceptance of the leveraged relationship is a prerequisite for a functional system.

Society’s Punishment for Refusal

The quitter population will grow when the consequences of quitting become less painful than the leveraged arrangement. Each of us must measure the acceptability of the arrangement for ourselves, but regardless of our tolerance threshold, if we stay, we must either take too much or give too much. In either scenario, once the injustice is accepted, we must live by deception, manipulation, or obfuscation to protect ourselves from our own judgments. We accept the unjust leverage and suffer, being less than our true selves, or we reject it and become the rest of the story.

Acceptance stories are plentiful and are documented in success theater. But the rejection stories – what society labels failures, quitters, or losers – are found in true-crime thrillers or cautionary tales. We spend our lives avoiding being the subject of such stories, and many would-be quitters, understanding the fallout that follows quitting, refuse to quit. Not because quitting is wrong, but because quitting forever labels them in the eyes of others.

Not only is quitting a scarlet letter, but it is also something that must be explained. Society demands the quitter’s explanation for the failure before granting re-admission into society. Gaps on résumés must be explained. A consistency, even a foolish one, is required. Society will re-admit the quitter only if the arc of the quitter’s story bends toward an acceptance of socially permissible behavior.

The Rebel’s Logic

If the quitter’s story lacks an acceptance of societal norms, society labels those quitters as rebels. As the population of rebels grows within a society, it is an indicator of a society that leverages unjustly and frequently.

When I review my refusals, I think of the final desperate moments just before refusing. The time a judge put everyone on the docket in jail. The time my football coach said I would never play Division I football. The time I simply refused to participate in the corporate duplicity any longer.

None of my exits were forced. I chose to exit over the alternative. I do not regret the decisions, because each of my refusals followed an illumination of an illusion. A person’s natural reaction to such circumstances is rebellion.

When I look at society today, it appears that I am not the only quitter disillusioned with the system – likely an indicator that relationships are frequently leveraged unjustly.

If these words strike a chord, if you have ever refused to play your role, then stay with me. We’re building a rebel’s logic, one refusal at a time.

Part 2 of this post will be published next week. It will discuss how to find redemption and thrive after failure.

Lion in the Mirror Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thanks for reading Lion in the Mirror Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.

After I rang the bell that ended a dream, the remainder of my day consisted of medical checks, HR, and career guidance. I packed all my gear and moved to another barracks closer to the Hotel Del Coronado. The quitter’s barracks.

Other quitters walked me through what we would do for the guys who quit during Hell Week of my former class, BUD/s class 200. We were to lead them from the vehicle to the cots inside a classroom where all the quitters would sleep. We would watch over them and help however we could – blankets, water, coffee, medical.

When the workday ended on the day I rang the bell, I went alone – for the first time in a while – to a convenience store on base. I saw the beer in the cooler when I went for the Gatorade. Gold Label winked at me and sang a siren’s song.

I was not 21, and I didn’t consider walking Gold Label down the aisle to the checkout counter. That evening, one of my roommates in the quitter’s barracks explained that base convenience stores sold beer to active-duty members, regardless of their age.

I didn’t know if I believed him, but my next trip to the store, I tested it. Gold Label called to me again. This time I answered, and we strolled down the long aisle toward the cash register together.

All were in observance: Little Debbies, Nerds, Runts, Starbursts, and KitKats. Even red licorice attended. I think I saw peanuts and sunflower seeds – the salty kind that swell your tongue – in the balcony.

A momentous day indeed.

The clerk said: “Six-pack of the Colorado Kool-Aid, two cheap-ass bottles of water. Those fuckers won’t stand up after you open them. I’m just saying. Watch the fuck out. That’s it?”

“Yeap.”

The total, the cash, the change, the ding on the door when I exited into the real world – expectations, concerns, heavy-fucking-shit waiting out there for me and my Gold Label – and two shitty bottles of water.

“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, John Donne

In this raw and final entry of the Drop on Request story, Part 2 of 2, Brian Plemmons revisits the precise moment he walked away from BUD/s Class 200. What began as a fight against failure turns into a confrontation with identity, pride, and the myth of invincibility. Through quiet rage, defiance, and reflection, he unpacks what it means to quit, and how that act can become the genesis of rebirth.

From the clang of the bell to the silence of his own breath, Noah’s Sky captures the split second where a man stops running from himself and finally looks up.

Key Themes:

The psychology of quitting — how DOR becomes both death and deliverance.

The mythology of toughness — how cultural, military, and masculine expectations fracture under truth.

Identity reconstruction — from “SEAL hopeful” to philosopher, father, and storyteller.

Systemic insight — how systems create performance myths, and what happens when an individual rejects them.

The rebirth metaphor — “Noah’s Sky” as a symbolic cleansing, flood, and renewal.

Subscribe to Lion in the Mirror on Substack for the written series and reflections that expand on each episode. Follow Brian on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for behind-the-scenes updates as he builds One Day a Lion, his memoir of failure, system rebirth, and Appalachian redemption.

The guy facing me, pissed himself.

He noticed that I noticed.

“What? It makes you warm.”

“You have on a mini suit. It’s running down your legs.”

“Into my booties though. Feet warm.”

It sounded nice. I pissed myself too. The urine pooled in my neoprene booties.

You must find joy in the small things in life. Warm urine squishy between frozen toes. You can quote me.

Others did the same. Piss mixed with adrenaline mixed with saltwater.

Time to think, waiting for the Kings of Dip-shittery (the instructors’ garage band name). Standing in warm booties, piss-odor wafting on the wind, I thought of the obstacle course.

Waiting in line at the course the day before, I had felt something new.

Hopelessness?

Maybe

Dark and slow and heavy – the darkness that walks the ground, as if the moon passes before the sun.

This isn’t for you.

“What?”

Word passed through the piss-soaked air, ‘instructors in route’. Candidate arms rise again, perfectly presented like debutantes to the ball.

Swim fins hanging from wrists, wet suit tops, KA-BARs in hand, CO2 cartridges in the other. Palms upturned.

Lined up beside the enlisted bar on base, called Froggy’s, or some such similar name that makes you want to get drunk and fast.

Froggy’s lawn held BUD/s class 200, standing and waiting for the Princesses of Pain (my term of endearment for the Navy SEALs assigned as BUD/s instructors). When we first lined up, sweat rolled down faces, wetsuits felt like hell-fire prison sentences. Saltwater smell. Seagulls squalled, flittered on the wind. Dark clouds rolled into our morning.

Thoughts of childhood on the beach, playing in the wet sand. Parents filming their only boy.

The Princesses of Pain rolled up on cue: clouds parted, sun beamed through, and angels sang to herald their presence. They walked between the ranks, inspecting gear. Quickly. Behind schedule because they sat drinking coffee and shaking off hangovers until the storm passed.

The order arrived and passed down the line: “get in the bay.”

My swim buddy and I walked down the washed-out bank. A sign stuck in the bay on a high pole. A warning. No swimming. Polluted water.

What the fuck?

I knew terrorist had not infiltrated the other side of San Diego Bay. The risk seemed excessive. We had pools. The Pacific Ocean in our back yard.

But fuck it.

Right?

I bent to pull my fins on, reached to pull the scuba mask over my face, and the glass fell out of the scuba mask.

What the fuck. Again.

I had heard the older candidates talking about the state of the gear just days before. Some candidates, like me, had Vietnam era gear.

And I believe it.

Duct tape held my gear together. Last visit to the stockroom walked my memory --

“This mask ain’t gonna cut it.”

“Yeah? That’s the only one in the bin, though. Come back tomorrow, maybe someone will turn something in.”

“If they turn it in, that means it’s broke, right?”

“Or they graduated.”

I paused.

“Is graduation scheduled?”

“Nah.”

“So, this mask was broken when it was turned in?”

“Yeah, but we fix it before it’s returned to stock.”

“Right.”

I am convinced a sense of humor is encoded within our universe. The cosmic series of events aligned in such a way that my mask broke just as the stock room clerk burned his tongue with his morning coffee. Of this, I am convinced. And it makes me smile.

I stood on Froggy’s lawn, nineteen years old and in the Navy less than a year, thinking about how to swim side stroke with my head out of the water.

My swim partner, never the same person during first phase because things changed daily, noticed me hesitate.

“What’s wrong?”

“Fucking glass just fell outta my mask.”

“Don’t open your eyes. Breathe out when you are under water.”

“Yeah, I get it. I won’t be able to track you though.”

“Right. We have a gear guy. The one with the sea bag. He ought’ta have a replacement.”

I found the guy. Yelled across a couple heads, asking for a mask.

“I gave’em all out already.”

“What?”

“No more,” he says, palms up, shoulders shrugged.

Fuuuuuck.

Darkness by me slithered.

Appalachia sings to me as my fin tips touch the bay: cicadas through the trees, haunts dancing on hurricane wind, a portrait entitled Moments before the Storm. Signed by the artist. I lean in to read.

LIFE, it says.

And now. You swim.