Got a ready alibi? You're kidding yourself

What's your go-to alibi? What's the card that you draw to excuse yourself from everything?

We all have them. Mine are that I grew up in a depressed, working class family and that my mother died young. These are facts, but I've transformed them into the worse kind of currency: I use them to absolve myself of responsibility. They're what I tell myself when I'm trying to get out of a deadline, escape an uncomfortable situation or look for an easy out.

Other people's might be "My father was an alcoholic," "By the time I knew what I wanted, it was already too late" or, simply, "I'm from Ohio."

I was thinking about this the other night because all I had to do was hit the "send" button to finish an important task and I couldn't. I sat staring at the screen, as if immobilized inside an iron maiden.

I had to send the beginning of my new book out for a blurb and I couldn't bring myself to do it.

What happened is this: I'd devised such effective emotional camouflage I couldn't see I was my own enemy. I had an arsenal of excuses: Classes were starting and my students needed me. My husband was in Alaska for a month (on purpose, for fun and in a Winnebago — go figure) and I was dealing with his household responsibilities in addition to my own. I wasn't quite back on my toes after recent surgery.

All true.

But they were only partial truths. None of them represented the real reason for my jagged, sodden and cringing inability to rise to the occasion.

These were, in fact, alibis, all polished up and neatly laid out. These were my pre-fab, cloak-and-dagger explanations to keep myself from facing what was really going on.

What was I trying to avoid? Why had it taken me six days of circling the computer to send out 60 copy-edited and proof-read pages?

They're from a book being published next spring. Nobody's read them apart from my editor, agent and a few close friends. By sending them out to a stranger, I was letting them cross the street by themselves without a guard. What if they didn't make it?

But instead of doing what I usually do — which to sit down and get things done as effectively and efficiently as possible — I gave myself reasons to stall.

I started arguing with myself as if with another person. I tried bribing myself, cajoling myself and threatening myself.

I got busy. I cooked until nothing remained in the cupboards, played with the cats until, yawning, they left the room and then — in a moment of truly desperate idiocy — started to organize my files.

These were alibis masquerading as activities.

Have you ever encased yourself in a sort of intellectual or emotional bubble wrap that prevents you from being damaged, but simultaneously prevents you from facing what you real feel? That's what I was doing.

Many of us invent elaborately designed barricades to place across our own pathways; it's quite remarkable we get anywhere at all. We might as well walk around with orange "Caution" cones in our back pockets.

Not only do we let ourselves out of things ("I don't feel so hot; I'm too old for this; Who cares what I do, anyway?"), we can allow ourselves to get so far away from accepting responsibility for our actions that we can't find the way back.

Many of us are expert at alibis. We think, "I can't go out tonight; I've already taken off my bra" or, as my friend Kari Lynn declares, "If you knew my family, you'd understand."

We think, "If only I'd been raised differently …"

I call these alibis, because what they are is attempts to prove that we were elsewhere when the crimes against ourselves were being committed.

No, I didn't hit "send" with a triumphal flourish. I did it for sheer exoneration. It was easier to be released from the obligation to myself by fulfilling it than it was to worry about.

It's tough to be in a relationship with somebody you don't trust, especially if that somebody is yourself.

Ditch the alibi; risk the truth.

Gina Barreca
The Hartford Courant
(TNS)

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Gina Barreca is a columnist for The Hartford Courant.