It Has a Name

You have a thing you are supposed to be doing. You are not doing it. You have explained this to yourself as laziness, or bad timing, or not being ready. I want to take all of that away from you and give you one word instead.

Call it Resistance. Not a mood, not a flaw in your character, not a scheduling problem. A force. I write about it the way you would write about weather, because that is closer to what it is than anything in the language of psychology.

Naming it does something immediately. As long as the enemy was your own weakness, every failure to start was evidence about you. Once it has a name and a nature of its own, the failure is a report from a battle rather than a verdict on your worth.

And it changes what you do next. You do not fix a force by becoming a better person. You fix it by knowing when it shows up, in what shape, and having something prepared for that moment. That is the whole of what I have to teach.

So stop diagnosing yourself. You are not broken and you are not uniquely weak. You are up against something that everybody with a body is up against. Give it its name today, and tomorrow we can talk about how it fights.