“Just this once”This is one of the most common excuses I have heard myself give in various circumstances when I mess up something. I convince myself that it’s always the first time I am being bad at what I do. While this may be true— I may actually have messed up for the first time in the given situation; there’s a pattern! I got so used to letting myself off easy for the mistakes that kept occurring so frequently with that excuse and I convinced myself that it’s okay to mess up. Now, of course it is okay to mess up but one needs to learn something from the mistake and take away something important from that experience. I did not seem to be doing that, instead I kept giving myself more and more chances to screw things up without learning a damn thing.
I have consciously tried to correct this and break from this pattern of perpetually making mistakes because I realise that how I do one thing is how I do every damn thing.
Here are a few examples—
- I’m late for my class, I’m late for my doctor appointments, I miss flights/trains/buses.
- I procrastinate on studying, working on my assignment, project, work.
- I get mad at my parents, my friends, my professors.
I kept focusing on the thing or place of the mistake. The point is I AM LATE no matter where I’m going; I PROCRASTINATE irrespective of the task; I AM SHORT-TEMPERED regardless of the situation.
I could go on listing many situations where I have been wrong and point of how it is merely the way I have been living my life and how it has become a part of me. In fact, I have made a list. Now, it is time for me to work on that list and make sure that it isn’t me anymore because I don’t want to be that person, it’ll take some time and require a lot of resilience and patience but I am ready to put the effort in to make myself a better person than I was before. I also know for a fact that there are many out there just like me facing similar issues and this is a call-out to them to come out of denial and accept who we really are and strive to not be those irresponsibly stupid people anymore.
