February
19
I really believe excuses are lies. It can be hard to be honest with others and with yourself. It is easier to give an excuse so you can not truly take responsibility for the situation. It may be easier but is it the most healthy? When a friend asks us to attend an event we do not want to go to, we make an excuse so not to hurt their feelings. Is that really why we do it or are we making an excuse so they will not dislike us? Are we giving an excuse to save our friend or to save our own face? Excuses come back to us choosing not to be responsible for our own personal choices. Wouldn’t your friend not mind if you were honest with them? Don’t we want our friends to be honest with us? When we are honest, the people in our lives learn more about us and how to better interact with us. By making excuses, we are keeping people from really learning about ourselves and truly developing relationships with us.How about the excuses we make to ourselves? We tell ourselves it is OK we didn’t start our exercise program this week because we had a long day. We tell ourselves it is OK we didn’t get invited to our friend’s wedding because we really didn’t want to go. We tell ourselves it is OK we didn’t get that job, we didn’t want it anyway. It is easier for us to lie to ourselves about a situation than to admit our true emotions about the situation. We don’t want to exercise says we blow it off. We are disappointed and hurt about the friend’s wedding but we would rather ignore the hurt instead of heal it. We wanted the job and we are sad we didn’t get it, why can’t we be sad about it for a bit before moving on. Why can’t we just admit the truth to ourselves?Because the truth forces us to be real, open, and vulnerable. We have to face ourselves and others. We have to be held accountable for our choices and emotions. It is easier to push everything under the rug but trust me, it all comes out in the end. It may seem hard to deal with it now, but it will be better for us in the long run. For now on when you hear yourself making an excuse, think about why you are saying it? As time goes on and on, you will learn it is easier and so much healthier to tell the truth.
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JM
on 19 Feb 2008 at 8:40 am #
Very true. It is so easy to make excuses because we get tired and lazy but it can truly hold us back from where we want to go.
Jeremy
on 02 Mar 2008 at 8:06 pm #
Hi,
I came across your blog (after I read that Planet Out article) and it’s pretty cool.
I wanted to share one thing that I thought of after I read this post. My friend Georgia and I were sharing how we each had a friend who we felt had let us down in some way. We went back and forth trying to look a the bigger picture (maybe the friend(s) had limitations, maybe the friend didn’t think it through, maybe it was a lesson that we were supposed to learn).
And then Georgia paused and just said, “But it still stinks though, doesn’t it?!” And we both laughed, because no matter what the reasons/lessons were behind the thoughtless behavior, we were each still hurt and it felt good to be honest and acknowledge that to each other.
That’s it. Just wanted to share that. And I’ll be back to read more.
-Jeremy