On the Dark Side of Habits

I have a precious few good habits, and I’m very protective of them. They serve as small but powerful reminders that I am more than my plentiful bad habits. There is, though, a slight downside that lurks within those good ones, that threatens to make them habits I no longer want to keep. It starts with my seemingly unavoidable tendency to create routine. I love there being a series of things I can expect myself to do every day, even at specific times. The problem is that I can be relentless in maintaining those habits and have a strong aversion to any change at all. Long story short, I don’t really cut myself enough slack.

I have written a daily journal (a diary, basically) every day for two years now, and it’s something I’m very proud of. I missed one day very early on the process, and that gnaws away at me sometimes, but the larger issue at hand was that, while it has been a habit I have been able to maintain almost every day, there are, naturally days in which I can’t. For whatever reason, it isn’t always practical to have the journal with me, or spend time writing it before I sleep, and it’s taken me a long time to come to terms with that fact. I have been policing my own habit, looking for a reason to prove myself right in saying good habits are beyond me, and keeping this up is, of course, not sustainable.

So I found a way around it. All I had to do was loosen the reins a little, and focus on what I was trying to get out of the habit. In practice, that became making sure that no matter how many journal entries I missed writing, I would always add them in later. This fulfilled what I saw as the purpose of my journal-writing – having a record of each day, however brief – while at the same time giving me the space to and comfort of knowing I can enjoy my day in its own right without having to compromise on a practice I hold dear.

This pre-forgiveness is something I accidentally achieved with this blog yesterday, and I’m very grateful for that. I’m currently without a strong internet connection, and spent most of yesterday travelling, so by a certain point in the day, I knew that writing a blog entry and uploading it wasn’t something I felt I could do. This bothered me for two reasons: I wanted to have written something every day so that I could classify this as a habit, and I wanted the automatic date markers on my website to reflect that. I quickly thought my way around the first one by reminding myself of the journal example I just gave, and that as long as I wrote two pieces today, the numbers would add up and any guilt could be circumvented. The second reason required less thinking, and more of something very valuable – acceptance. There are obviously things beyond my control, and that will always be true, but there’s no value in needlessly making myself feel bad. I just have to do my best and be okay with that.