I,
Procrastinator

I come before you today not with an essay, but with a confession.

The confession is not that I didn’t write an essay (which also, I did not). It’s that I totally could have written the essay earlier this morning, and instead I:

1. Redid my monthly budget for the third time this week,

2. Ordered groceries I in no way need, and

3. Researched and compiled three different backup options for my Instacart shopper because Stop and shop was out of Ben and Jerry’s coffee toffee ice cream (Why does everyone fail at stocking Ben and Jerry’s coffee toffee ice cream, and lie about it on Instacart?) Star Market was also out last night. You see, I have been here before.

Hi, my name is M, and I’m a procrastinator.

Procrastination. It ironically sounds like a positive opinion. I am pro- crastination. If “crastination” means dedicated, comprehensive, and completely avoidable self-sabotage. Procrastination. Like a painstakingly acquired skill. I am a pro at crastination. I should really look up what exactly it is that I have somehow become such a pro at.

You’re doing it again! You are literally procrastinating by looking up the word procrastination. Do you really have to do this right now? Can you maybe finish your confession first and then fill it in?

Procrastination: The act of delaying or postponing something (Oxford English dictionary). The act of unnecessarily and voluntarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so (Wikipedia). To put off intentionally or habitually. To be slow or late about doing something that should be done: to delay doing something until a later time because you do not want to do it, because you are lazy, etc.

Thanks for the side of moral judgment, Merriam Webster. Can we go back to the confession now, please?

Procrastination: From the latin word procrastinatus, which breaks down to pro (forward) and crastinus (of tomorrow). Well I’m not sure what this means but I guess I will forward it to tomorrow. A complicated failure of self regulation involving a poor concept of time and an inability to manage emotions, also known as akrasia, “the state of mind in which someone acts against their better judgment through weakness of will.”

Called “hateful” in the conduct of affairs by the Roman consul Cicero. Associated with depression, higher stress, higher rates of illness, lower wellbeing, lower grades, inadequate retirement savings, higher income taxes, missed medical visits. According to procrastination.com, one of the main barriers blocking you from getting up, making the right decisions and living the dream life you’ve thought of.

In reality, I could have written this essay pretty much any day this week. What was I doing instead? Yesterday morning I was avoiding gathering photos for my magazine in advance of the editors’ art meeting by cleaning out my kitchen cabinets, which I’m pretty sure I’ve done about three times in my seven years here. I set up one corner for spicy stuff, one for sweet, one for baking, and one for snacks. I discovered some spices I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, including Jamaican Jerk seasoning and cream of tartar.

The day before yesterday, I was supposed to be walking to my weekly broadsword class. (Yes, I attend a weekly broadsword class. Let’s not even get into what’s being procrastinated here.) Instead, I was reading Heather Havrilesky’s old Ask Polly columns on New York Magazine’s The Cut, which because I don’t have a subscription required opening each column in a new Chrome incognito tab, only I kept forgetting I already had another column open that I hadn’t finished reading, which I had to finish reading first, only what was the one I had initially wanted to read again? Let me go back and find it – but hey, this other one looks interesting, let’s open it in a new Incognito tab – oh shoot, I have one open, I should finish reading it – and broadsword class is half over.

Sometimes I feel like my mind is a butterfly. It flutters in the air, pausing here to touch one fuzzy foot to a petal, there to unfurl its proboscis into a pistil, but it never actually lands—it hovers, exhausted and starved, then departs, in a whoosh of color and glittering dust, off to blind a child.

Blind a child? Oh, right—when I was a kid, someone told me the powder on a butterfly’s wings can blind you. User Anadik C. on steemit.com says it triggers a “distinct, rapidly destructive intraocular inflammatory disease reported in two-year cycles in odd years since 1975,” but on Reddit they say it’s just loose wing scales, no more harmful to than household dust, which is made of dead skin and the remains of asteroids.

Asteroids? Yes! Studies from ten years ago show most of our dust comes from a giant cloud surrounding the sun, which comes from asteroids and comets orbiting Jupiter, which are orbiting Jupiter because they collided just beyond Neptune with some OTHER comets, coming from a huge comet field that surrounds our solar system, extending thousands of times its length, into deep space—

Do I have ADD?

As a weekly reporter, facing a print deadline every Wednesday morning, I’d get up Wednesday at sunrise, and for the next four hours I’d write and file every story on my list—a terrifying, adrenaline-fueled sprint that would render me useless for all of Thursday and Friday.

In my creative writing MFA, we were supposed to submit 25 pages to our mentors every month. I’d spend the first three and a half weeks staring at a blank screen, and the final three days pouring forth a torrent of words in a series of sweat-drenched all-nighters.

In high school, I’d fritter away the afternoon and evening chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, typing away at my YA action adventure novel, organizing my shelves of fantasy and sci fi, stalking the tall boy in my World History class on WhitePages.com—and getting steadily more anxious about my undone homework.

I remember finally sitting down at the dark kitchen counter around 11 p.m., the stove lamp lighting the American history or AP biology textbook on the counter in front of me. Training my eyes on the shapes on the page, I would will them to become words. I would have killed to need glasses, which would at least make me look smart, but there was nothing wrong with my eyes.

No matter how I vowed not to leave my chair till the work was done, how I threatened myself with the prospect of another note home from a disappointed teacher or bribed myself with the promise of sleep, it was my brain that couldn’t focus.

Is it the procrastination that creates the ADD? I’m determined not to start, so my attention darts in any direction but where it needs to go, shedding glittering cosmic dust that blinds me to both the task at hand and the activities of my own mind?

Is it the ADD that creates the procrastination? I know I won’t be able to focus, so I put off making the attempt, which I know will yield only headaches, ulcers, tears of frustration, silence from whatever higher power I appeal to, and not one inch more progress than if I never began at all?

Or is there something else at the root of them both? Am I pathologically unable to achieve? Afraid of failure, or maybe success, or just finding myself alone with my own mind? Does being in the moment trigger some deep existential angst about the nature of the universe, or my inevitable death? Is the world simply too much? Or am I not enough?

I’ve reached the end of four double-spaced pages, and I still haven’t said what needs to be said. Maybe it’s time to finally buckle down. To confront this thing, once and for all. To face whatever it is that lies deep in the recesses of my consciousness, and bring it into the light.

Or maybe tomorrow.