Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via creator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.”
Today’s prompt: EXCUSE
I don’t like excuses, not one bit.
I had a therapist briefly in college —- it was my first time having therapy of any kind. One of her big observations is “you make everything hard.” As in — you seem to find an excuse for everything not working out the way you want.
That particular conversation probably carries more weight in my head 35 years later than it really deserves.
Maybe it’s a chicken and egg thing. I think I’m the kind of person who embraces “hard” but I also know I make things unduly difficult.
One of my part-time jobs is very exacting (my kind of thing!). But as human beings do, I make errors sometimes. One thing this job has done (and the development of Dad’s passing had something to do with this too) is that it has made me be more diligent about getting to bed (I’m sure my coworker who “chatted” with me online when she was starting work in Jerusalem and I was “still” up/not in bed in the US at a previous job would chuckle at this.
It’s near impossible to be careful with language when you’re exhausted.
And the next step will be managing my time even better to fit in the things I want to do. To write, to submit to places that will pay me to write, to (gasp!) clean the house (well, given our soon-to-list status, to declutter the house).
Excuse me for a moment while I go make a plan….
This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday linkup.
Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.
A plan! Always a good idea, but doesn’t always work the way we desire or want does it? Loved this post friend. I’m your neighbor at FMF again this week
Thank you! I’ll visit soon. This is another topic deserving of deep, deep analysis. Five minutes only scratches the surface. 🙂
“You make everything hard” has a lot of resonance for me. When I was in grad school, I had to write a computer programme to predict the response of pilings under earthquake loading.
I didn’t really know how to do the math gracefully, so I used brute force…over 5000 lines of code, and no comments. I figured I knew what the thing was doing, why should anyone else?
When I showed it to my advisor, he whistled, and said, “This looks like it was written by a gorilla.”
And thus my nickname, Mongo.
Wow, Andrew, I can totally totally totally relate to this. The visual is funny too (of the gorilla). Thank you for stopping by.
Interesting. Yeah, it’s hard when you’re a perfectionist. Come to think of it, I’ve got a plan that needs making, too.
SO VERY HARD (and I’m not yelling with the all caps!). Good luck with your plan.
Dear Paula, I can relate to this post in so many ways. I take one day at a time for the most part. If you ever want to connect and share ideas about motivation and productivity, I am open to that. Have a blessed weekend. Visiting from FMF, Julie
Thank you, Julie! That sounds great!
Oh yes… so often a Plan can help us dismiss or silence our excuses and it can be oh so helpful! Great post! I found you on the FMF Community fb page.
Exactly! I’ll look forward to visiting your post. 🙂