Setting goals you can’t seem to meet?
Are you fighting to attain a dress size? Looking to lose extra pounds and never quite making your goal weight?
Your “skinny jeans” make a mockery of your daily diet and your self-esteem. You visit your closet nostalgically, running your fingers over jackets and blouses that once made you feel like a million bucks. Your pencil skirts are a size 6 (and you’re not) and your favorite summer dresses, likewise.
Now what?
Chasing “Success” and Making Excuses
Perhaps you inch close to success, losing 20 of the 30 pounds that you determine will make you comfortable, more confident, healthier. And you can’t get the rest of the way.
Or worse, you balloon back to where you started.
Maybe your fight is for renewed health or improved fitness. You want it, badly, and work the nutritional necessities with focus and discipline. You eat your berries, your dark green vegetables, your salmon and whatever else your doctors (or your own research) tell you comprise the proper course. You hit the gym, stick to the laps in the pool, the grueling regimen on the Stair Master or the treadmill. You manage successfully for months.
And then you stop.
Oh, you have plenty of reasons. The kids. Your schedule. The stress at work. The promotion you’re vying for, but there, too, you don’t get what you want. You come close, but don’t nab the prize, consoling yourself with solid performance in other arenas as you juggle marriage, income generation, volunteering, carpool. You weather the sheer fatigue of it all, and appreciate the good moments.
As for not meeting your goals? Not reaching the dreams you can’t quite shake? Your responsibilities and your limitations are reasons, you tell yourself. Legitimate reasons. But they’re also excuses.
Rationale for failure
I’m not just talking to you. I’m talking to myself. And offering some of my reasons that I am not successful in ways that matter to me.
- I run out of energy.
- I run out of time.
- I am a poor sleeper.
- I have chronic pain issues.
- I have financial constraints.
- I have no emotional or logistical support.
Believe me, I have more where those came from. (Ugh. How pitiful and childish I feel when I see them written out!)
And yet, each reason is valid objectively speaking, and conspires to render goals more distant. To be brutally honest, I cannot imagine what it would be like to have a partner cheering me on. I cannot imagine what it is to have family helping with children. I cannot conceive of the financial guillotine not hanging over my head.
Nonetheless, I know these statements for what they are. Excuses.
Self Sabotage
We all make excuses at times, to ease disappointment. We also stand in the way of our own success. Women in particular are masters of self sabotage, and food abuse comes to mind as a common example, and one I’m familiar with.
For years, I sabotaged my eating habits, a set of behaviors rooted in a strange and convoluted childhood, and issues of esteem and self-destruction. On those rare occasions when I was able to find a stable weight at which I looked and felt good, those closest to me grew uncomfortable. And something in me was uncomfortable, so I slid back. Or gave up the attention to nutrition, to exercise, to a level of self-care that I unknowingly felt I didn’t deserve.
Eventually, I vanquished those demons, but it took me into my forties to do so.
Occasionally, I dwell on the wasted years, on the damage to health and well-being, but not often. Bad habits rear their heads from time to time, but they no longer rule my life.
Successful Sabotage
Everyone is afraid of failure; risking pursuit of dreams guarantees that we risk failure, and likely will encounter it in our efforts. No success is constructed without failures behind it; they are the sturdy steps, the necessary infrastructure of learning what works and what doesn’t. We keep climbing, if we are able. If we don’t give up.
Yet women sabotage in ways that are encouraged, and too often we start very young. As we become wives and mothers, we pour our precious personal ambitions into those of a husband and a family. We garner praise and pleasure in our roles and our sacrifices. We also wear the mantel of familial accomplishment: the crown of being a loving and supportive spouse, the barely balanced laurels of proper parenting.
We set aside dreams for later, or they’re sucked under into the muck and mire of everyday duties. A fortunate few have assistance – periods of calm, encouragement from friends and family. Dreams continue to breathe. Dreams of all sorts. Otherwise, our reasons for deferring dreams are sound, and socially acceptable. Our reasons, that for some of us, obscure self sabotaging behaviors, stubbornly circling a core of discontent.
On days when we are brave – or simply raw – we ask ourselves: Am I making excuses? Have I walked away from my dreams? Is there something more?
Dream Weaver
The melody of Dream Weaver floats through my mind this morning, as I wonder why I have yet to fulfill my earliest dreams that remain as pressing as they were forty years ago.
Instead, I battle ghosts. Daily. Nightly. Some are dead, while others are living. Some are places I cannot return to; others are emotions that cause me to run. We keep our distance from ghosts – if we’re smart, if we’re cowardly, if we choose an unruffled surface, or a refusal to confront the clear, hard truths of human failing. But ghosts populate our lives, bullying and threatening all the same, clouding our vision and forcing us to turn away from charted paths.
Perhaps this is the means to discover other roads to explore.
Maybe this is only my truth. Wishful thinking and an uninspired lecture on a day when self sabotage seems hardier than the sun beckoning, daring me to stand up for my child self. For my adult self. Challenging me to work harder, or differently, or both.
Walking Away
When other little girls imagined weddings and babies, I was keenly attuned to my dreams: to be a writer of literature, and to speak five languages. To inhabit a culture, a tongue, another’s mind and sensibilities. To move fluidly in and out of those transcendent experiences, and paint them on the page in fine letters. Vibrantly. Poetically.
All these years later, I remain incapable of burying my dreams or walking away from them, and equally incapable of attaining them.
I have reasons lined up in my own defense as I take my seat before the jury of my voices: parenting is harder than I ever imagined, as is solitude, as are financial burdens. Yet I have few regrets, and certainly not about motherhood. But I want more. I have always wanted more. And I here I am, saying as much, openly, after a morning of wrestling with tiny blocks of sound and significance to build a compelling sentence. I am angry at ghosts and reasons. I recognize them for what they are.
Excuses.
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Well, this really speaks to me this morning, BLW. I’m happy that in the madness of a summer schedule that’s somehow harder than the school year schedule, I was able to stop by.
My problem is that I tend to be too tough. I can’t take no for an answer. I run at the same wall over and over again, like a bird flying at a window. This works pretty well but a few days ago my book got turned down by an agent (I don’t even know why I sent it out right now) and I’m having a major case of self-doubt. Writing and writing and writing for nearly ten years and I’m wondering if I just have to accept that I’ll never see my book published.
But there’s that spark inside of me – that bird that flies at windows – that says “keep trying.” I don’t know that I can stop her.
I get this, Linda. Don’t stop that lovely bird. You know you don’t want to. Not really. She’s not yet ready to fly, or she’s aimed at the wrong window.
I refuse to give up too.
The paragraph on not being able to imagine what it’s like to have a partner’s suport or family’s help with kids really rang true for me. I’d like a little support before I die.
But in the end it’s up to us, right? No excuses. I’m actually going to start posting only twice a week starting this week so I can give more time to my latest book. I can’t give up the blog, but I have to pull more moments out of the air for my fiction. It’s hard, and I know you get it.
No regrets at all. Just continued aspirations…
From the beginning I knew I wanted to be a mother. It wasn’t until I went to college that other desires grabbed my attention. Once I married and had a baby, I knew these other dreams would need to be put on hold or forgotten because that was what I agreed to when I found out I was pregnant. I did not bow down to any other person’s wish, but rediscovered my original dream buried in the dirt. After I wiped it off, I realized what a gem I was given. Some days it looks dull but most of the time it is as shiny as I could ever hope for.
I admire the steadfast quality of your dream, Amber. And you have a remarkable family – from what I can tell – which gave you a model of what parenting can and should be. What siblings may be to each other. I suspect in part that I never dreamed of motherhood because I could not imagine being any good at it. My fundamental example for parental love was a mother who was troubled. I couldn’t imagine knowing how to mother well. And as you know, I’ve loved being a mother, and would have loved more children.
The issue of primary concern to me is that women remain the caretakers most of the time, the larger portion of the time. With community of some sort to assist, we may nurture other dreams as well as being engaged partners and parents. But too often, our dreams are an afterthought. And women are still required to make a choice that men needn’t make – between family and career/dreams.
I am speaking from my own experience, of course, but also that of many women I have known. Some have taken the primary parenting role by choice. Others, by default. Perhaps it’s as simple as “you can have it all, but not all at the same time.” But I doubt anything is quite that simple.
It’s interesting that I should read this today. Husband and I each just reached a personal goal (he met a weight loss goal; I reached a month without biting my nails). Both were goals we had set before and failed at repeatedly. So what was the difference this time around? For him, sheer determination. For me, sheer nail polish (with a built-in bitter taste).
And while I agree that some reasons for not meeting our goals are, in fact, excuses, I think that there is a tipping point at which the reasons pile up so high that reaching the goal becomes less and less likely. Some of us have lives that run like well-oiled machines. Financial stability, emotional support, good health are all present. And it takes a lot less skill to meet a goal in such a life than in one that hands us all the advantages of a 1973 Ford Pinto.
Never have I heard excuses put so eloquently. You definitely have a gift and need to pursue it.
Thank you, Peg. (Now where’s Hazel when I need her, so I’m not wallowing in boy laundry? Oops… another excuse! For not doing the laundry! 🙂 )
Just what I should be reading…can you keep on writing these reminders? It’s time for me to stand up and take charge of my body and what it has become since children. Granted my youngest is only 15 months, and I’m still nursing the little guy, but since going back to work, things have slipped. While I wouldn’t say nutrition is entirely one of them (there is a balance of good that goes with the bad in this house), physical exercise has been virtually nil. Whereas I used to walk and walk with the babe, now I spend both nights with this laptop in bed, tired. I’m planning to try the 30-day shred, to see if it can give me a real kick start. It’s an important goal, my husband is going to help me along. Because I believe that when you take care of yourself physically and nutritionally, so much of the rest just falls into place.
I think maybe you are being a little hard on yourself, BLW. Sometimes the things you mention are excuses, and sometimes genuine roadblocks that make you so tired you don’t have the emotional energy to go after your dream — for that hour or week. But if the fire is still there inside, keep pursuing it. There’s a reason for the flame.
We are our own worst enemies, aren’t we? But, the messages we tell ourselves — you can’t, you shouldn’t, you don’t deserve this — actually come from deep inside and from long ago.
They’re not who we are anymore!
We are always becoming …. Once we stop, we die.
I wonder about this. About excuses. Sabotage. About how things might be different if I even TRIED to do something for me instead of just going on as usual and ASSUMING that I don’t have time or opportunity or energy or money or or or. Yes. I wonder.
Reading your post today breaks my heart a bit. I’ve dealt with some of the struggles you mention, but have always conquered them, due in large part to incredible support.
It may be morbid of me, but I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what my life would be like if something happened to my husband. Could I keep the house and the nanny? How would I manage to have any kind of social life? How would I keep my own burdens from burdening my son? When would I get to exercise? Would I be too damned exhausted to keep up with all the things that I value now?
Single mothers are a breed apart. The fact that you are even willing to tackle this topic and continue to strive for more is inspiring. And it prompts me to stop and be grateful for the support that I’m blessed to have. Thanks for the reminder.
There are many circumstances that have been entirely outside my control over the past decade, and before. I believe that one of the reasons that my world is somewhat isolated is because I represent the “cautionary tale” – what can happen, if a certain set of circumstances occurs at one point in time, or in close succession.
At the same time, I know it is more complex than that. Everyone’s story is.
I don’t find it morbid to think about what your life would be like without your husband. I find it natural, and realistic. And perhaps even enlightened. Single parenting – or in my case, nearly solo parenting – is brutally hard. It is a whole other world. It is not what I signed up for, but then, we don’t sign up for a lot of things.
But children are perhaps our greatest motivation to be our best selves, whatever the circumstances. My sons have been my sweetest privilege, and I think most single parents – fathers and mothers – rise to the occasion.
Can’t stop dreaming or attempting to live my dreams. Thought I fail time and time again I will succeed with one or more.
Man after my own heart, Jack.
WHAT are you doing hanging out in my closet…and in my head?