08 7 / 2009
Excuses, excuses.
I grew up hating the word excuses. Its what my parents told me I was making up when I didn’t want to do something. “I’m not making up excuses!” I would say. That was a pretty good one, looking back.
One of the problems with having a big imagination is that excuses come easily, and intricately. When something is so detailed and entangled in personal weaknesses, it becomes difficult to refute. The excuse becomes a remedy to the problem.
One of the main methods in cognitive behavioral therapy for getting a patient to understand the absurdity of the thoughts they choose to believe is to write them down. There is something very honest about words standing up on a page. So here they are, ten excuses I found myself making over the past year (and tonight) that have hindered me from writing:
1. I only have stools to sit on to work at my computer and I have poor posture which will cause me to throw my head forward which will likely result in a pinched, left trapezius which has been giving me trouble for years so I probably shouldn’t subject myself to that.
2. I look at a screen all day at work and it has been consistently damaging my eyes for the past year, so looking at a screen to write blog posts will only be more detrimental. And to add to that, the prescription in my glasses and contacts hasn’t been updated in a while so I could be inflicting even more physical damage to myself by writing a blog post.
3. After a full day of work, I don’t have the mental energy to write anything coherent.
4. I write all day for work, so writing in my spare time isn’t going to be healthy. I need to diversify.
5. Developing a blog that is compelling enough to attract a readership is extremely time-consuming. (There is so much wrong with this one)
6. My apartment is dirty. I should clean that before I do anything else.
7. People will think I’m weird or stupid or a combination of both.
8. Shouldn’t I be doing things outside? Interacting with people? Walking? Meeting up with friends? Blogging isn’t an effective replacement for all these things.
9. Coworkers will find my blog and use it against me.
10. I’m tired.
I’m just going to let those sit for a while.
