Author, Historian, Storyteller

I have often heard it said that procrastination is the lazy man’s disease.  Which to some extent, I whole heartedly agree with.  There are dishes in my sink right now, because quite frankly I was too lazy do them.  Or just didn’t want to, which is really about the same thing.  But there is a whole other brand of procrastination that I don’t think has anything to do with laziness.  I think it has more to do with a lack of confidence.  You are faced with a task – it doesn’t necessarily have to be a hard task or even a new task, it could be something that you do every week – and for whatever reason there is that kernel of doubt somewhere deep down that you can’t do it.  Or that when you do it, it won’t be any good.  So you put it off, you procrastinate. Every time you look at it, or think about it your blood pressure rises imperceptibly, and that crawling sense of dread creeps its way up your slowly restricting throat.  So you put it off another day, another hour, another five minutes, until at the very last moment you complete the task with each step more pain staking than the last.

Of course, since you waited so long, and had to rush through to the completion with no time for revisions or fixes, it’s not going to be your best work.  But it’s passable, or at least you hope so, and you breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over.  Until you have to do it again, and the whole process starts over.  By procrastinating, you are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.  A vicious cycle that will repeat itself until the end of time.  You don’t believe that you will do a good job, so you put it off.  By putting it off, you don’t do a good job.  By doing a mediocre job you a reaffirm to yourself that you aren’t good at the task.  This serves to dent your already delicate confidence, making it all the harder the next time around.

Until finally one day, you blow it off completely.  You don’t fulfill your commitment, and maybe you get away with it this once.  And this once you feel relief.  You feel like you’ve slipped by this one time, so you’ll be able to do it next time.  But then you shirk your responsibility a second and a third time, and all of sudden you’re not the one that does a mediocre job, you’ve become the person that lets everybody down.  Those dents to your confidence have now become holes, rusting away and threatening the integrity of the entire structure.  So you attack the task with a new vigor.  You’re going to prove that you can be relied upon, but instead of the high praise needed to start repairing your damaged self, you get the cold reception of someone who finally did what they had promised all along.  Thus the cycle starts all over again.  A battle of confidence.

So how does one win this battle?  How do you go about breaking the cycle and repairing the damage?  Because you can’t rely on anyone else to do this for you, it’s not in their power.  You alone can fix the problem, despite the fact that you feel as if you are the least capable person for the job.  Little do you know, you are perfectly capable for whatever task lies in front of you, you have exactly the skills needed to succeed.  It all starts with forgiveness.

This article is late . . . but it is done.  I forgive myself.

This work is mediocre . . . but it is on time.  I forgive myself.

This didn’t turn out like I wanted it to . . . but it is still works.  I forgive myself.

I haven’t blogged in almost a month . . . but I’m working on one right now.  I forgive myself.

And I will do better next time.

Sometimes I forget how truly lucky I am, and it’s days like today that remind me of just that.  When I reached 100 likes on my Facebook page I was sent a congratulatory email from Facebook with a coupon so that I could try out Facebook ads.  So I waited to use it until my latest Heroines of History article came out.  Which if you haven’t seen that, you should check it out.  Mother Jones is pretty awesome!  So, for the past two days I’ve been playing around on Facebook ads.

Apparently, the way that it works, is that Facebook sends an ad out, but you don’t pay until someone clicks on the link, likes it, comments or shares it.  So basically you only have to pay for the results, which in my opinion is pretty awesome – this is of course assuming that I correctly understand how it works.  At any rate, I put out an ad for my page along with sending out “sponsored posts” of my Heroines of History article along with a couple of my older blog posts.  So out they went into the internet ether and I waited to see what would come of them.

What came of them, was that my friends kept liking and commenting on my sponsored posts . . . and I got to pay for each and every one of those.  At one point this afternoon, I actually found myself thinking, “STOP LIKING MY POSTS!”  Then I stopped for a minute to appreciate how truly ridiculous that comment was.  I have people in my life that support me to the point, that even though they have already read something that I wrote, they will read it again, and like the post or comment on the post all over again.  They weren’t doing it to boost my analytics numbers, or encourage others to start a dialogue.  They were doing it because they care about me and appreciate my work.  In my book, that makes me pretty damn lucky.  That’s worth a couple of bucks of ad money . . . or how ever much it actually cost.  Did I mention, I don’t completely understand how it works?

I’ve been making a concerted effort to pay attention to the things that I say to myself in my head.  Now I realize that that sentence makes me sound a little “Looney Bins” but go with me on this one.  I’ve been trying to notice the word choices that I make in my inner monologue.  I’m a word snob. I love the way that different words feel in my mouth and sound echoing through my head.  Words are so powerful and as Mark Twain said:

So I’ve been paying attention to my word choices.   This introspection was brought about because I realized that I kept calling myself a dumbass.  I forgot to put more paper in the printer before printing – “Dumbass!”  I accidently hit the 30 second button instead of the 1 minute button on the microwave – “Dumbass!”  I grabbed the wrong book off of my nightstand – “Dumbass!”  I tried to send an email before I put in the recipient’s email address – “Dumbass!”  And so on and so forth.  My days were filled with one dumbass quip after another.  Here’s the funny thing; I don’t believe that I’m a dumbass.  Quite the opposite.  I know that I’m very intelligent.  I’ve been accused of being elitist much more than I’ve ever been accused of being dumb.  So why call myself that?  And why put up with that?

If anybody else treated me like that, I wouldn’t associate with them.  I wouldn’t want anything to do with them, and quite frankly I would probably think that they were an asshole.  So why do I treat myself in such a way that I would never tolerate from anybody else?  In fact, I would never treat anybody else like that either.  I was basically being an asshole to myself.  Good times!  So I’ve been working on that, which has been quite the task because calling myself a dumbass has apparently become an ingrained habit.  So my inner monologue has sounded something like this:

“Dumbass! Shit!  Stop that!”

“Dumbass! Don’t say that!”

“Dumbass!  Stop being an asshole to yourself!”

“Dumb . . . hah!”

“Dum . . . well what am I supposed to say?”

“Du . . . Argh!”

“Genius!  Hey, that works better.”

“Genius!”

“Genius . . . well if I’m saying it sarcastically, isn’t that just as bad as dumbass?”

“. . .”

“Dumbass!  Damnit!”

“#@$#%#”

“. . .”

It’s a work in progress, but I am determined to be as nice to myself as I am to others.  And yes, my inner monologue does tend to swear like a sailor.  One of my many quirks.