I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I am the way that I am. Where did I pick up the habits that I have? I know that I drink coffee every morning. I can remember a time before I did that, when I was a child. But I don’t remember picking up the habit. I don’t remember the part in between.

And that is just one concrete example. What about all of the little micro-habits I indulge in during the day? Why do I stand the way I do, or use the words I do, or frequent certain places over others?

I recently took a class where we read an essay. It made the argument that everything we do with ease is the result of practice. Sometimes this practice is conscious and other times it’s not. This made a lot of sense to me. I had never really considered it before but everything has to have an origin point. Everything has to come from somewhere.

But in my own experience of being inside my life, these habits feel so powerful because they shape so much of my day-to-day experience. I feel alternatively comforted and crushed by them. The idea that the less flattering parts of my personality are just the result of being unpracticed in certain healthy traits is demystifying. Previously it felt like I was cursed with certain things like poor follow through, sloth, or indulgence. Now I realized I just haven’t spent the appropriate amount of time cultivating the habits of personal discipline and integrity.

On one hand this is comforting. I am not uniquely broken or cursed. There is no inherent lack that I came into the world with that has caused my negative outcomes in life. However, this revelation also comes with a barbed edge. Because while being uniquely cursed is a terrible fate, it’s also a great excuse.

For most of my life I would have periods of time where I would ruminate on why I wasn’t more one way of another. Why wasn’t I better with people? Why didn’t I have more energy, or more ambition? Why was it easier for me to study Quentin Tarantino movies than calculus? I cursed the fates for my deficiencies. I made punishing, all-or-nothing plans to change my ways. When these unsustainable plans inevitably fell through, I would take that as proof of my wretchedness.

Lately it’s been easier for me to see this cycle for what it really is, which is an indulgence. The rumination felt productive. It felt like I was interrogating my life and my character in an attempt to make it better. But really, I was just coming up with excuses and reinforcing a personal narrative that I was not capable of change. The few times that I did make plans to change, the scope of these plans was so grand and the parameters so punishing that they were always doomed to fail. This meant that they always came with a built-in excuse to avoid change altogether. All of that time I thought I was working, I was really just procrastinating.

It’s a humbling pill to swallow, but facing up to this reality also feels freeing. I am not doomed. I simply never really gave myself full permission to try. It’s time for me to practice practicing.