Excuses: Those Tricky Things

Excuses. They’re tricky little things really.

They keep us from being fully productive.
They keep us from being fully honest with others. 
And worse, they keep us from being fully honest with ourselves. 

It’s this last category that I have fallen into lately.

I’ve been making excuses to keep myself busy. Anything to occupy my time, so that I don’t have to look inward. Anything to avoid checking in and dealing with the fears lurking around that childhood dream of writing books for a living. It’s what I’ve wanted my whole life. But this thirty-six-year-old woman hasn’t been able to make that happen. 

Since my last book published in 2019, I have struggled. I went back and forth on my genre and classification as a writer. Then, I wrote a complete manuscript. A Murder Mystery. Which sadly, I have decided to file away. It doesn’t work for a myriad of reasons. All of which I’ve tried to fix. But it still doesn’t work. Admitting that after more than a year of effort is a gutting thing. 

Therefore, I’ve been making mental excuses to avoid writing something new. Until today. Today, I looked at those excuses and asked why. Why am I making them? It came down to fear and a lie I have believed for too long—that I’m not good enough. That I will fail. That I will write something again, and it won’t be good enough. It won’t sell. It will be wasted time. 

I faced the ugliness today. It has been painful, but it has left me with a choice. Do I want to continue to believe the lies and continue to make excuses or do I want to be at peace and rest in the assurance of who Christ says I am? 

Of course, the answer is easy, walking it out is the hard part.