First of all, let’s get this out of the way. This is not about letting you (and me!) off the hook and letting your excuses control your life. Not at all.

This is about when life throws you curve balls while you’re standing hip deep in muck with your hands full of very expensive family heirloom china. (Did I mix enough metaphors for you there?)

This is about the reasons and times when you choose not to scrapbook. (Operative word there-choose! Very important.)

There have been times when I haven’t scrapbooked. Wanted to, but just couldn’t get myself on the horse.

(Warning! Personal stories ahead!) 😉

When I first started scrapbooking, my output was very limited because I was very unsure of myself. I wasn’t sure about how to go about telling the stories I wanted to tell. I also felt like I was missing something as far as design goes. You’d think as a productive rubber stamper I’d have had the design thing covered, but something about the size difference threw me off.

Not being one to let that stop me, since I really did want to scrapbook, I set about finding things to help with journaling and design.

I took classes at the local scrapbook store. I looked at all the scrapbook magazines I could find out there, and chose one to subscribe to. I read books. (The best intro to scrapbooking tome was from Memory Makers–Scrapbook Fundamentals. Hard to find now.)

The local classes weren’t very helpful, since all the instructor did was read from a book, but they did help me realize that journaling is just writing. I write all the time. Why was I making it harder on myself? Why did I think there was something special or different about it? Still don’t know the answer to that one.

The magazines were wonderfully helpful however. I subscribed to Simple Scrapbooks, and never looked back. I’d occasionally buy another magazine, but Simple was where my heart lay. And it was full of ideas! Design ideas. Story ideas. Album ideas.

And then through Simple, I learned about Stacy Julian’s brain child: Big Picture Classes. And then found out one of my favorite contributors to Simple, Cathy Zielske, was going to be teaching a class all about design. I signed right up.

After that, I was making pages like crazy. I signed up for Stacy Julian’s Library of Memories class, because that was the next problem I had run into while taking CZ’s class– never having the photo I wanted easily accessible.

So that’s one way I solve my excuses. If I don’t know how to do something, I do research, and take classes, and immerse myself in a subject. I call it batch processing my life. You should have seen me on my Doctor Who binge.

The next big excuse that stopped me right in my tracks was the death of my mother-in-law. Besides the obvious emotional upheaval, I also struggled with a lot of guilt at the time, because I had scrapped so few pages about her. This was one of those times where I gave myself permission to just not scrap for awhile, to let the raw edges of grief desensitize. One of the first pages I made when I slowly began to scrapbook again was a layout about my mother-in-law.

 

Afterwards, my scrapbooking pace slowly increased again, until I found Lain Ehmann’s Layout a Day Challenge group. With that, there was no stopping me. Right up until I played assistant to Lain’s MotherLOAD challenge, I finished every single challenge, with at least a page every day.

Of course, there came times each month where I would be tired or sick or just not motivated to make a page. Every time that happened, I tough talked myself into making a page. After all, the reason I didn’t want to scrap that day was basically because I just plain didn’t want to. I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty lame excuse for me to use. So I’d make a page. Everyday. For a month. Repeatedly. And I loved it.

Nowadays, I don’t make myself finish a page everyday during a challenge. I KNOW I can do it, but really don’t feel the need to. I don’t have anything left to prove, at least not to myself.

Those are some of the excuses I’ve used and surmounted in my scrappy life.

Now it’s your turn. What are your excuses? Do you let them stop you? How do you keep scrapping?

 

There’s a reason this website is called No Excuse Scrapbooking. Some people may think the idea is a little harsh, but it’s not. It’s all about seeing yourself in a positive framework.

We all make excuses about why we can’t do things, whether it’s scrapbooking or gourmet cooking or hang gliding. We all claim we don’t have enough time, or enough money, or enough guts to do whatever it is we say we want to do. But that’s not really the problem.

The problem is we’re afraid.

What if we get it wrong? What if we show what we make to other people and they don’t value it as much as we do? What if the design becomes dated? What if we spell something wrong? What if it DOES take hours to create? What if it doesn’t? What if we really are boring?

What if we like it?

The thing about excuses is that they carry over into other parts of our lives. They become the dead weights that prevent us from becoming who we want to be. They become all the reasons we CAN’T do something. As if we’re incapable of being creative or thoughtful or joyful or productive.

I’m here to tell you that you CAN do things. You ARE an amazing person. You can be creative. You can appreciate your life, right now, in all its mundane, routine, exciting minutia. You can celebrate your life. You can MAKE things. All sorts of messy, gorgeous creative stuff that you never really believed that you could.

Because the difference between excuses and reasons are a state of mind. Excuses are our inner demons telling us we’re not good enough, that we CAN’T. Reasons are us saying we can, but we choose not to.

And that’s what it all comes down to. You don’t have to scrapbook, or cook gourmet meals, or hang glide, but it should be because you choose not to, and not because you’ve got a great big pile of excuses standing in your way.

Excuses are the things that stop us from being ourselves.

You’re not going to let those excuses stop you, are you?

You can make something wonderful! Why don’t you start now?