So after talking a good game on how gamification seems to really be working last week, I’m on track to be missing my weekly pool session.

Normally, this is where I’d spiral in a fit of shame fuelled anger. The usual recriminations: I’m weak, pathetic, how hard is it to do 1 thing, etc. But this year it’s catching me a little different because of phrase I’ve had bouncing around my skull.

Explanations, not excuses.

I often find that as a society we tend to label reasons why we, or others, either don’t do something or don’t meet the mark in someway as an excuse. Excuses are inherently negative; even when we tell ourselves or whoever is the excuse giver that it’s a good excuse, we’re still often implying they’re trying to worm their way out of their commitment and into forgiveness.

We can sometimes do the same for other people, like a parent trying to excuse their child’s behaviour. Always it’s the same; excuse the negative, hope for the positive.

This creates a pretty heavy burden on me when it comes to my own shortcomings. My perfectionism has set a pretty high bar for expected behaviours and outcomes, so excuses come loudly and often to an unforgiving mind. Follow that up with the self-awareness to know what I’m doing on all sides of the debate and I usually just end up doing nothing as a result to avoid the shame.

Until I started reframing it.

If excuses are emotionally charged attempts to avoid consequences and achieve forgiveness, explanations are cold logical attempts to gain understanding, which helps you gain a measure of peace. An explanation for something helps you see the why behind a thing without their being an expectation of judgement. You’re just stating facts after all.

Explanations aren’t consistently perfect; there are bad, or more accurately, lazy, explanations just as there are bad excuses. A lazy explanation is hand waving, surface level thinking. A good explanation then has logic at it’s core and in ‘if this then that’ premise. ‘This happened because that happened causing this.’ Since I’ve started having that phrase beat against the edges of my skull, dealing with incidents and failures have been significantly easier.

So what’s my issue and explanation this week? It’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to miss my pool/snooker obligations this week. It’s due by Tuesday but various reasons have kept me away from the table.

First, I’m sick. I have a heavy cold that started being symptomatic Monday, progressed to the peak on Wednesday/Thursday, and am now feeling a bit more alive whilst also expelling all of the hard gunk. Not ideal playing fitness.

Second, I had a 3 hour neurodiversity assessment on Friday, something I’ve been dreading for a while, largely because it was a 3 hour appointment talking about my entire life to a new psychiatrist (unsurprisingly, the results were yes, you’re on the spectrum). This also meant I could risk sneaking off the to the local cafe and their terrible table to play pool in case I was late for the appointment.

And yet I’m still gonna try. Now I’m over the worst, and fuelled by a ginger powered concoction, I’m seeing a friend later who needs some support. I’m meeting him down the pub, which I hope has a pool table, but if not I know there’s a table nearby. I’m sure I’ll find my way to it somehow.

But if not, I’m fairly safe in the knowledge that I’ve had some fairly solid reasons this week, and I can go on regardless.