I am truly staggered by (1) how much Wisteria's post reflects my own experience and (2) the knowledge that it is clearly not just the two of us agonizing in vain-- judging by the other comments here, so many others seem to be afflicted as well.
I procrastinate everything. In person, at parties --whatever-- I speak of this ailment lightly, but it is no joke. It's terrible, and I feel it deeply. It affects everything-- I just resist, resist, resist. Even with this blog: for weeks, I have procrastinated posting (for a while, I procrastinated even reading it since I knew I would feel guilty that I hadn't yet posted). Even worse, I consistently rake myself over the coals about procrastinating. Virtually everything, to me, serves as an example of how I should do things sooner (and, relatedly, better) and all the ways that I fail. It is a terrible way to live, and over the past few years I have been experimenting (half-heartedly-- often I don't have the energy, given all my self-flaggellation) with thought patterns to try to counteract the negativity and paralysis. Usually, of course, those don't work, but a few minutes of respite here and there are sometimes enough to get me by.
But enough about that for right now. What is completely remarkable to me, and more to the point at the moment, is that so many others feel the same way. My god-- we're all so isolated, and yet this is such a profound pattern. In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting results of this secret blog experiment so far-- that so many of us have already posted about the depth of our frustrations.
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Posted by Pumpkin to academicsecret at 8/08/2006 10:01:00 AM
