Today's topic is both near and dear to my heart. In fact, I've been meaning to talk about it forever yet have simply never found the right time or words to discuss it. Such is the nature of the beast, I guess; we're talking about procrastination.
I have a loooooong and storied history with the fine art of putting stuff off. Going back as far as kindergarten, I distinctly remember telling my teacher, "I don't need to do my coloring now, because I'm a fast color-er and can do it later." She told me that we only had fifteen more coloring minutes and that our pictures would later be hung on the wall, so they needed to be really good. Not one to back down from a challenge, I stared at her, grabbed my crayons, colored the entire "D is for Dinosaur" in five minutes while staying strictly within the lines, stared at her again, and went back to my blocks for another ten minutes. It was following my first parent-teacher night that I learned that the word "precocious" is teacher code for, "pain in the ass."
Unfortunately, over the next sixteen years of schooling, I never learned otherwise. Every year, it seemed, another teacher would read me the riot act about how, while I might get away with putting my projects and homework off until the last minute THIS TIME, it would eventually come back to bite me in the ass. "You won't be able to do this when you get to the fifth grade!" became, "...to junior high!," "...to high school!,""...to college!," "...to your JOB!" Yet here I sit, 38 years old with both a Bachelor's and Master's degree, not to mention a pretty successful career arc, still honing my procrastinatory tendencies.
To be clear, this is not something of which I am proud. A little smug, perhaps, but definitely not proud. Because while I tend to excel under pressure, that doesn't mean I don't get an overwhelming sense of anxiety leading up to the main event. It also makes it very hard to motivate myself to undertake a task without a specific goal or deadline in mind. "Run a marathon" has a very real, tangible and finite ending; "write a book someday" does not.
Yet here I am, yet again, asking you to give me a chance to post...to write...to go on sharing my absolutely insane, asanine and melodramatic thoughts. I'M BACK..
BACK AGAIN, and I hope you (and I) will follow along with wherever this space encourages me to go next! 😈
