Excuses

Day 100 and ?

I haven’t over eaten. I’ve been busy. I haven’t been sleeping well. 

But....I haven’t exercised in a week, I haven’t been tracking my diet and I’ve eaten food I know I shouldn’t. 

And.....I have no excuses. 

The truth is, despite all that talk about bending like a willow, when life got tough, demanding and stressful, I fell back into those old habits I’ve been trying to break. I ate for comfort, I mismanaged my time and found every possible opportunity to crawl into my Hobbit hole and hide in the darkness. That’s my pattern, that’s my habit; I literally curl up in a dark room and hide...and usually eat. I’ve never admitted that before because to me, it reflects as the very worse criticism of myself. I could go into the reasons why I feel that way or list even more to explain why I find comfort in it but the most relevant fact is that, no matter how established it is, it is just another habit. It is a habit that I find comfort in but it certainly doesn’t make me happy. It also is not a solution. What it is is easy. Really, if I get right down to its roots, it’s giving up. Why fight my problems if I can just hide from them?

That is what makes this habit so easy to fall into, it is familiar, it is comforting, it feels safe. The healthy habits I’ve been trying so hard to establish are not easy, they do not enclose me in comfort or safety. Quite the contrary, they make me feel raw, vulnerable and exposed at times especially when I’m sharing like this. True, in reality, they are better for me, they promise positive change in my life, they empower me, they nourish me both physically and emotionally and help me to grow but they are also difficult, at least at first, and even painful and scary. 

My therapist, Tamala, read a quote to me during our last session, “Action does not necessarily bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.” It is too easy to fall back into the comfortable and familiar but there is absolutely nothing positive about inaction. Sure it gives instant gratification but there is no future in it, quite literally. Taking action is living. It’s growing, getting stronger, overcoming obstacles, finding solutions and always moving forward. It is also difficult, scary, painful. It takes courage. It takes strength and resolve to break loose from those old familiar and comfortable habits that are holding us back. 

I could list excuses as to why I slipped back into hiding away from my problems and nourishing them with junk food but all that is is an explanation of how my problems became so overwhelming in the first place. I’ve been feeding them, helping them to grow and become larger and stronger than me while I hid from them. Taking action is the first blow that will knock them down a bit. Each step forward will cause them to shrink a little more and their grip on me will lessen. There isn’t an easy answer nor a quick one but each action will also make me stronger and eventually, I will find more comfort in the action than I once found in the inaction. 

I’m going to plot a new course. I have admitted to being an over thinker and over planner. I expect to make an immense amount of progress in each day and when I don’t meet that goal, even my progress feels like failure. So, here is the new plan: I will make ONE positive action a day. Any progress beyond that will be bonus. The planned goals aren’t working because, if for some reason I don’t meet them, I feel like I’m stepping backwards and that makes that small failure seem immense. It becomes easy to use the excuse, I missed doing that yesterday so there’s no way I’m going to meet that five days this week goal so might as well let it slide today, too. My solution, have some positive action as my only goal so even small progress will feel like a huge success. 

Velma, my health coach, told me she was proud of me for all of the self discovery I’ve made over the last two months. This journal has been of great help to me as a source of introspection. I think however, I’ve been in self denial when it came to the source of my problems. I can examine cause, I can make excuses from now until judgement day but I and my comfortable habits have been the major problem. And, when I put strict restrictions on myself, I’m really just making it easier to fall back into that old excuse for doing nothing and calling it a solution. For now, my goal for the next seven days is, an action a day. Hopefully, I’ll accomplish more than that but as long as I’m checking off that one action each day, I’ll feel like a success.