At this stage in my life, I don’t procrastinate the way I used to during my college years and even up until my mid thirties. I have finally understood that no amount of procrastination will make any difference in how unpleasant a task will be. It took quite a long time in coming, I have always been pushed to procrastinate because of fear. Fear of dealing with bill collectors, fear of dealing with unpleasant things, fear of doing things that I might fail at. I have written fairly often that a lot of my decisions, to do things or not to do things, were for the most part motivated by fear. It is amazing that fear can have had such a hold on me. It’s only in the last four years that I have been able to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. I now understand that I had given fear too much power in my life and gradually I have become more confident in myself and slowly fear has lost its grip on me. I realize what the phrase “what’s the worst thing that can happen, I’ll die?” really means since as some of you know, four years ago I almost died in the hospital due to some very poor choices that I had made with my life. Tropical virus, eating disorder, drinking beer all the time and smoking way too much will do that to you. Four years later after a lot of thinking, healing, therapy and writing, I am learning more about myself and how much courage I actually have, it helps to learn good things about yourself. It reinforces all the positive things that you do for yourself, you see that it is worth it when you treat yourself with the respect and the love that you deserve. How did I get on this tangent? Oh yes, I was speaking about fear and the damage it can do when you give it too much power in your life.
And now that I got all that off my chest, when I do find myself wanting to procrastinate because I’m really not feeling it, doing whatever dreary task is at hand. I jump into my latest science fiction/fantasy book and lose myself for a while until the nagging voice gets the best of me and I put the book down and jump into the task to do it and get it over with.