The thing I gave up that I did not need to give up

I quit something last year. Told myself it was not working and I needed to focus on what mattered. It sounded mature. It was mostly relief.

The thing was not failing. It was slow. And I did not have the patience to keep going at a speed that felt like nothing was happening.

I found out later that it was about to work. Someone else picked it up, kept going, and it became real. Not overnight, just with the patience I did not have.

The part that bothers me is not that I stopped. It is that I told myself a story about why I stopped that had nothing to do with the truth. I said it was not working. It was working, just slower than I could tolerate.

Now I try to be honest about which is which. Am I stopping because it is genuinely dead, or because I am tired of not seeing results yet? Those two feel identical in the moment.

Have you ever quit something right before it turned? And how do you tell the difference between dead and slow?