It’s difficult to find the balance in self-criticism between holding oneself accountable for procrastination, and not giving oneself enough credit in light of mental health, finances, or other potential obstacles. I am someone who struggles with feelings of laziness, and in some sense I still think it’s true no matter how much time I dedicate to anything. Things like my blog or reading a good book sometimes get neglected in my singular pursuit of other things – I get tunnel vision, in a sense.
That’s not to say I never procrastinate, though. I procrastinate. Really, I procrastinate way too much… sometimes to the point of really testing my capabilities as someone who can turn things around on a dime. This isn’t because I have to, it’s often because I waste all the extra time leading into my frantically productive rush. This isn’t always the case, and sometimes I tell myself it’s to do with thinking things through subconsciously before actually doing them, but overall I think I need to hold myself accountable by calling it procrastination. Maybe a compromise could be that it’s procrastination 30-50% of the time.
Depression plays an interesting role in the mix in that it’s often very difficult to tell whether I’m putting off my duties or creative output not because I “just don’t feel like it,” or because I’ve actually slipped into a depressive state of mind without realizing it. My depression personally manifests in a subtle way that leaves me less motivated while I feel completely normal otherwise. I usually notice in an unpleasant moment a day or a few later that I’ve actually been operating at a less than desired capacity.
I’m not a wizened scholar or learned therapist, so I have no real conclusion to draw from any of this. It seemed like expressing these thoughts at some point would be better than never posting them.
I’ve had to reflect on these feelings in light of the first two years of my college education distracting me so drastically from my personal writing journey (at least in the sense of publication, though not in improving my craft) that I didn’t publish an already-completed short story collection sitting in my computer files in all those two years. It’s only now that I’ve put the finishing touches in for print publication, though it’s technically been available electronically for some time. This has been a grand sort of procrastination, and entirely to my disbenefit, but I’ve been busy improving my writing, learning to write poetry, and studying literature like Faulkner and Gilman. I’m rectifying the problem now, and writing about it in hopes that it in some way “helps” others to read about an amateur’s fumblings, but in any case, thank you for reading my strange thought process today. In some way it might’ve “helped” me too.
Author C. F. Bellairs 