Confessions (#18)

Since last Saturday, I have been on vacation, spending time with family at a North Carolina beach. I used it as an excuse to avoid writing last week's blog post. And I would have let it go, if not for all the other missing blog posts since the beginning of this year. So, I became disappointed with myself. That led to a lack of daily journaling. Five straight days went by without any written self-reflection. However, there was plenty of internal self-criticism. In addition, except for Sunday, I deliberately avoided my vacation ritual: a daily, early morning hike up and down the beach, followed by an hour long talk with my parents. Like a positive-feedback loop, things spiraled out of control. The planned fiction writing? The random sketches? Nothing. Finally, by mid week, I put away the three books I had packed for this trip--without a single page read.

Please do not think I did not enjoy my vacation. I had a lot of fun, between the good food, playing in the ocean with my daughters, seeing my nephews, talking with my family, and hanging out with my wife. And I did get to relax, whether it was drifting with the waves, going out to eat instead of making dinner, or just staring out the car window listening to music and funny conversations.

However, I have a problem. It is like people who suffer from chronic anxiety. No matter how relaxing and calm the situation, these people will find something to be anxious about. While it may not always be debilitating, it remains frustrating. Worse, it reinforces the behavior. It becomes an endless cycle.

For me, it is creating. No matter the place and time, I fret over the projects that I have not started, or the ones I have not completed. Rather than confronting this mental obstacle, I avoid it, by daydreaming. But daydreaming is a drug--it is temporary. Soon, I realize I am not getting anything done, and I get annoyed with myself. The cycle begins anew. The worst part is that most of this happens exactly when I should be taking it easy, and enjoying the present moment.

Precisely because I am not creating when I should be, I hate myself when I do not create when I am relaxing. 

So, what causes this internal strife? Have I found a viable solution?

Read on to find out.

(From the show, Adventure Time. IMHO, one of the greatest animated series of all time.)

On a daily basis, I struggle with a part of myself. It is a chronic habit that either formed a symbiotic parasitic relationship with my psyche some time in early elementary school. Or, it became an expression of genetic material planted since conception. Regardless, my choices and environment have shaped it into the enmeshed web of self-sabotaging behavior that every day I battle to remove.

Whenever I conjure up a story idea, it ratches up the daydreaming, distracting me from writing it down. If I have a strong reaction to a political article, it awakens my personal fears about expressing my observations and opinions, and I avoid sharing my thoughts. And should an image in my mind inspire me to draw, or create something with my hands, that old habit reminds me how I do not have the skills to see the project through, or even start it.  

It is procrastination. For forty-four years I have drawn lines in the sand against its eroding waves. I dare to claim that I have found a better solution. This time it will be different. But, with each passing year, these acts of defiance fail. Ultimately, I succumb to this terrible habit. 

Yet, I have never given up hope that I will change. Even after a moment like last Sunday, when I failed to blog, and I was full of doubt and self-loathing. In some ways, the failure is like a tide wiping the beach clean of crumbling sand castles. It clears the way for a fresh start.

My mind was ready for a better understanding about my procrastination. And the Universe delivered a solution by the middle of the week.    

I did not find it in a book written by a well-known author.

Or in a Ted Talk led by a famous self-help guru.

Nor by speaking with a family therapist.

My epiphany was born from a twelve-minute YouTube video hosted by a tatted-up man from Australia who only started his channel several years ago. He offers up a mixture of life advice, personal stories, and pop-culture history. And he always delivers his insights with an important caveat: what has worked for him may not work for other people, or accurately describe their situations.

His perspective could not be any further from my own. Besides being born on an island continent half a world away, his other life experiences and choices in no way mirror my own. His parents were well off until a life event drained all their financial savings, so he experienced poverty. He traveled to Canada with a girlfriend and a pocket full of change, doing odd jobs, and a lot of drugs and alcohol. Then he returned to Australia just as broke as he had left it. At some point, a shark bit off a large chunk off his leg while surfing, his mother became deathly ill, and his brother attempted suicide. 

Yet, he managed to create a successful YouTube channel, start an animation studio, publish a self-help book, get married and have a child. All within the past three years.

So, how did I connect with him? It was not through the dozens of tattoos covering his body. Instead, it was his struggle with procrastination, and the various solutions he attempted in order to overcome this bad habit

His latest video, which I watched while on vacation, several days after failing to blog, presented an insight that clicked with me. It was not the first time he had said it. In fact, the example he used, of drawing the same subject over and over again for a year, appeared in the very first video of his I watched. That was over a year ago. This particular drawing project, and his success with it, caught my attention at the time. However, I never followed through. Some times it is not enough to watch or hear a solution to a problem. Frequently, that solution needs to be presented in different ways. Occasionally, the timing matters, too. 

For me, he presented a different angle of the same solution, and it came just as I was disappointed with my failure to deliver a blog post. 

This time, he focused on the "failing" part of the solution. Procrastination thrives on the fear of failure, or even mediocrity. In this latest video, he talked about his willingness to accept mediocre results, if it would allow him to complete the tasks. Striving for perfection, especially for a procrastinator, is counter productive. It becomes an excuse. Perfection is also an obstacle to people who lack skills or experience. Failing is the first step towards succeeding. When he decided to write a book, he struggled to get a single word down on the page. Until he decided that instead of writing a "good" book, he was going to write a "bad" one. Everyone is capable of writing a bad book. It became easier to put words down when he was not striving for perfection. Eventually, his writing improved, and his book became better. Through this process, he produced something publishable.

That is when it clicked for me. When it comes to my writing, my drawing, and even my reading, I need to accept I am going to suck at it, and do it anyway. Instead of daydreaming and worrying about what I write, I need to tell a terrible story and share my messy opinion. I have to put pencil to paper and doodle lines and shapes, even if they look nothing like the objects I want them to be. Finally, I have to just pick up a book and read it, rather than fret over its ability to impress me.

And if I had not been feeling disappointed over my decision to skip another week of blogging, that insight probably would not have affected me has much as it did.

So now I am motivated to change, and I have the means to see it through.

This week's goal is to allow myself to suck at things.

I will write bad stories and messy opinions, sketch ugly drawings, and read mediocre books.

Whether I succeed or not, I will at least have something to blog about next week.