Why I Procrastinate

Theme song: Dead

Procrastination is a relative thing. It's all about avoiding that which would, at least theoretically, allow me to reach my full and unique potential.

I always suspected, and today I got some proof to call my own, that busyness is a form of procrastination.

This exciting discovery led me to face the facts of my personal drama: Today I had enough time to accomplish the two most important things I had to do.

I didn't want to do them.

Instead, I wanted to enjoy my new eye shadow, roll around semi-nude on large piles of high quality literature, and generally soak in the beauty of the universe around me. More procrastination.

Faced with an opportunity to complete the business on hand in a responsible and orderly fashion, when I've long said I wanted to feel less busy, why did I feel sleepy and dreamy? Why did I feel like eating handfuls of Good & Plentys?

I know the answer: It was to anesthesize the pain of doing the tasks I didn't want to, the ones that, once started, wouldn't be that bad and, after all, pay my rent.

The tasks, one blog post and one analysis, required a modicum of intelligence, skill, and creativity. Compared with working in an industrial slaughterhouse, these were good tasks. These were tasks I worked hard to get, said I would do, and for which I am well paid.

My busy life ensures an endless array of tasks and activities: urgent, important, and meaningless.

Woven through this matrix of activity, is my heart's desire. More of a whisper than a promise, I say no to it a thousand ways a day.

Busyness supercharges what I know I can deliver, but which offers no real challenge (yet does deliver word kept and rent paid), with adrenaline, so I feel falsely fully alive while doing what I said I would do to make two ends meet and/or buy Ferraris. It also creates a buzz over the whisper of that which I truly desire but am quietly, even subliminally, terrified I can't deliver.

The whole creative process is the question of whether I can deliver on my desires made manifest. I do not know, and tend to doubt, whether I can write the next Anna Karenina until I write and write and write, enduring years of uncertainty. And so I invent a million (or did I say thousand?) ways not to try.

Whether or not they allow themselves to hear the whisper, most people, I feel sure, are living with this unaddressed pull, and it makes them crazy.

What to do?

I already mentioned self-sabotage in the form of fistfuls of candy.

Alternatively, I could do some other useful thing, perhaps less desirable, like clean the house or answer email (That actually sounds appealing. Couldn't I just archive it all, unread?).

I can't abandon the above tasks altogether because, if nothing else, I value my integrity. I said I would complete them, and so complete them, by God, I will--instead of the creative endeavors that, as of now, only in theory, promise to deliver my full potential.

My full potential can wait until tomorrow as for so long it has and, being potential, always will.

Lacking busyness I turn to fistfuls of candy, housekeeping, personal drama, or whatever other handy addiction or tool of procrastination I find or finds me. The world is blessedly full of obstacles real and imagined, for which I suppose I should be grateful.

I'm excited! Which way will it go?

Your Turn

Why do you procrastinate?

{photo credit: lilymonster}