Chinese is high maintenance, and has very small cultural overlap with westerners. Becoming good at a language is only half the battle; the second half is to stay good, and for that you need to maintain it.

English has the massively unfair advantage of being culturally dominant in the western world. As a Frenchman, once I became good at English, it was dead easy to maintain it. All I had to do was to keep doing what I had been doing since I was five: watching Hollywood movies (but not dubbed anymore), reading sci-fi books (but not translated anymore), and so on. The maintenance gets taken care of naturally.

Now, take German: at the end of high school, I was completely fluent in German. But now, I couldn't say two words to save my life. That's because after high school, I didn't maintain it, and it rot away.

With Chinese, in addition to learning new characters, I had to spend an ever increasing amount of time every day just to avoid forgetting the ones I had already learnt. Unlike American culture, I have no particular interest in Chinese culture, so the upkeep had to be paid entirely through sheer, conscious effort.

Living in China alleviates part of this effort, but after watching all the issues China is plagued with get worse rather than better over the past 5 years, I don't want to live there long-term anymore. So I decided to just drop Chinese. Thinking back on this decision makes me extremely sad, but the truth is there are many things I'd rather do with my time rather than keep paying the Chinese upkeep.

I could just drop the characters and focus on speaking and listening instead, but ugh, just the idea of being illiterate grosses me out, even in a foreign language. It's irrational, but I can't help it. After traveling to Taiwan - which is awesome btw - I even started learning the traditional writing of every character I knew. To be fair, traditional isn't that difficult, but that wasn't making things easier either. Oh well...