I was considering skipping today’s scribble; it’s 9 pm, I’m tired and I thought maybe just this once I could completely skip it and go watch a movie. You know, another one of my wild Saturday nights (they’re happening every week lately).

But then that little voice inside reminded me of my wish to be consistent, my original concept of writing every day without any preconceived notions of grandeur or excellence, merely that I do it.

And I remembered my idea of it being a project for 2018 to write every single day. Naturally forgetting to do it is one thing, but intentionally skipping it? Well that’s basically cheating. And if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a cheat.

I’m lazy, confused, highly critical, overly-sensitive, I laugh at weird things, eat too much chocolate and have a compulsive perfectionist tendency… but I am not a cheat!

I’ve always maintained that there’s no point in lying to yourself about things; at school as a teenager I wouldn’t even cheat in class exams because I believed that ultimately, if you didn’t know the stuff, you needed to learn it, so what was the point? Your teacher might give you a good score, but when you went to do your exam you were most likely going to fail. Better to fail now and be up front about it, right?

Except that I’ve come to notice lately this brutal honesty of mine… it can end up making life a lot harder. I won’t take short-cuts because I somehow believe that taking the longer, harder route is better, you’ll grow more, you’ll learn more, harder is better.

Sometimes you can indeed learn a lot more along the way and sometimes harder pushes you to do and be things you would never have imagined otherwise.

But a lot of the time, harder is just making life harder than it needs to be, and it’s already pretty damn difficult. So if there’s an easier route that doesn’t harm you or anyone else, that will bring you to the same result as the harder route without you missing some important details along the way… well you should probably take it.

Of course, I reckon I’m preaching to the choir here, since I know very few people who would willingly take the harder option and be so brutally honest as to pass up on help and short-cuts when offered.

So let me rephrase it. If you’re not like me, simply carry on as you are. If you are like me, then God help you, you poor thing! Just try not to internally combust. It gets very messy.

Ciao darlings!

Lizzie xxxx