My name is Troy, and I'm a procrastinator. Allow me to explain.
About a month ago, Psychology Today asked me if I was interested in participating on their blog site. I happily accepted, encouraged that my publisher, New Harbinger Publications, had recently made a similar request, to which I also agreed. Scheduling for the first posts was something of an issue since I was coming up on a short tour of Australia with my coauthor to promote our recent book, Mindfulness for Two. I deferred committing to the first posts until I had completed the book tour, but I told myself (and just maybe an editor or two) that I would find a few quiet moments on the trip to start working on my first contributions. And this, dear reader, was a lie.
No, I wasn't an overly optimistic or ambitious goal, a misestimation of my free time. I wish it were. It was a bald-faced lie, and what's worse, it was a lie I cheerfully told myself--as if I weren't the last person on the Earth who would believe me.
You see, I'm lazy to an almost comical degree. When deadlines press upon me, you can count on me to be anywhere but at my desk: I'm sprawled on the bed, shopping for ceiling fans on my laptop or driving aimlessly across town to buy guitar strings. Or I'm hunting for plastic jellyfish at an import store (you see, I took it into my head that an acquaintance needed to hang a sea-life-inspired mobile in her office, which, by the way, I never finished.)
And now that I think of it, procrastination and sloth aren't my only shortcomings. I'm not the best son in the world, as I have no doubt my mother, who lately hears from me only quarterly will tell you. And I give my wife flowers somewhat less often than I call my mother. Scattered around the Bay Area are literally dozens of drivers who probably still bolt up in the middle of the night, cold sweat on their brows, remembering the ranting lunatic in the car behind them, screaming obscenities and pounding his fists on the steering wheel. By no means am I finished, but I'll spare you the rest. All in all, I'm really a pretty lousy person.
But I really want to be more disciplined, more dependable, more understanding, compassionate, and loveable--to be better. It might look clumsy, ridiculous, and insincere much of the time, but I really am constantly fumbling for change in my life--and I know an awful lot of people who do the same thing. We wake up each morning undaunted by the fact that the day before ended up, well, somewhere not quite where we hoped it would. And we get up anyway.
So this, dear reader, is what I plan to write about in this blog, which I've decided to call "Fumbling for Change": that resilience we seem to be able to find in ourselves as we try to change for the better. This spirit is apparent in the best psychotherapy, and it's absolutely evident in self-help--a body of work that is born from the impetuous notion that anyone as broken as I am could do anything whatsoever to make my burden a little lighter. I'm not an expert at anything, and I'm not particularly insightful, but I feel like I'm in right in the soup with you, trying to make good. If anything I can observe and peck out in this space proves at all useful to you, my work will be well rewarded.
