#commitment-phobe

Schroedinger’s Head Cold

For the past few days I’ve been feeling like I may or may not have a cold. This is annoying, but I’m actually kind of impressed to learn I have commitment issues even with germs. Or, depending on my self-esteem at any given moment and how fucked up you like your metaphors: “Damn, even GERMS don’t know my body is worth staying inside.”

Are you a dabbler? Do you flutter from one project to the next, never finishing anything substantial? Join the club.

For Sale – One unfinished bridge to nowhere. Cheap!   There is a secret club. Nobody knows how many members it has. There are no written rules of conduct. There is no regularly scheduled meetings, and you may not even know that you are a member. It is the Dabblers Club. What is a dabbler? A dabbler is a person who is drawn to many different, and sometimes very diverse ideas, hobbies or areas of…

I believe that people can change. I believe that people can grow and mature. I believe that some people, or perhaps everyone, deserves a second chance at something. 

However, the kind of people that live their lives with a perpetual second chance mentality quickly lose my respect. There are honest mistakes that come out of real efforts, and then there are obvious failures that come from laziness. Those perpetual second-chancers are constantly making the latter. Yet, they refuse to change their ways, because it’s easy to believe that you can put in less effort, commit less of yourself to something in case it goes badly for you. Because, hey, you’ll just get another chance if it fails. 

There are two major problems with this: 1) The second-chancer ends up hurting himself because he will live in uncertainty, unable to commit to the important things in his life; 2) There will be lots of people that the second-chancer hurts (and most of the time unintentionally) because she has a habit of half-investing in someone or something (before she is sure of anything), changing her mind, changing her mind again, and thinking she can come right back and REALLY invest this time. 

The second-chancer is not naturally malicious (though some can be), but his habits break trust. Because the problem with being a second-chancer is that you’re really a third-chancer and a fourth-chancer and so on. If you believe you can pick something up, drop it, and come right back to it like nothing happened AND you get away with it once (the second chance), then you will continue to believe that this is not only possible for you to do again, but an acceptable habit. The second-chancer will ask for second chances and sincerely mean it in the moment, because she believes that each time something fails for her it was a different mistake, it was a different beginning. Each re-try is still a second chance. And so she escapes the responsibility of real certainty or commitment. Meanwhile, the person on the receiving end of the second-chancer’s wavering has been hurt far more than just once.