Why Twelve-Year-Old Me Hates All Your Lame Excuses

You want a nice, cold, dollop of truth?

Your excuses suck.

They suck majorly.

And you want to know why?

Because every excuse you have is just a premeditated lie. You’re lying to yourself and to others.

My excuses suck too.

Why do we make excuses?

There are a multitude of reasons we decide to make up a reason for doing (or not doing) something.

We bullshit until the bulls come home about things we don’t want to own up to (or even admit).

Excuses are nice.

Excuses are safe.

Until they’re not.

I could make up excuses for why I don’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning, but my job would suffer.

You could make excuses about your behavior when out drinking, but that’s just a lie to yourself about how badly you need an AA group or a therapist.

Or both.

We could make excuses for why we never set, strive for, or succeed at our goals — because not doing anything feels safer than doing something and failing.

I used to make excuses for everything.

If I wasn’t doing well in a class, it was the teacher’s fault.

If my workload sucked, was too heavy, or too light, it was my boss’s fault.

When I couldn’t lose weight, it was the fault of my diabetes.

If I was late to work, it was the fault of bad drivers, road conditions, a missed alarm, excuses, excuses, excuses.

Do some of these sound familiar?

Maybe it hits a little too close to home?

Good.

Maybe this is the kick in the ass you need to realize that making excuses does nobody any favors, and it only makes you the victim.

Being the victim is nice.

It means you get to be right 100% of the time.

But it also means that you’ll never grow.

You’ll never become who you dreamed you’d be as a child.

When you think back to your twelve-year-old self, does that version of you shine with unrealized potential and big dreams?

If twelve-year-old you could see you now, making lame excuses that just shift the blame away, would she feel sorry for you?

I know that twelve-year-old Colleen would feel sorry for that version of me.

She wouldn’t understand why, for years, I gave up on my dream of writing for an audience greater than one.

She wouldn’t understand how I could get so caught up with trivial, stupid things that don’t matter.

And just like she’d ask me, I’m asking you:

What’s your excuse?