I am a procrastinator. I’ll be the first to admit it. Now the longer I live, the more I also become comfortable with living with my procrastinator identity, which has become a dangerous territory. It spread like a virus, starting off with chores and schoolwork, now I can’t think of something that I don’t regularly put off. I procrastinate in basically every aspect of my life, which is a horrible method of living (I would not recommend). I fill my life with casual stress every day just because I cannot take deadlines seriously.
I’ve always been one and I’ve actually tried to fix it, many, many times. Whenever I think I am about to beat the system, my brain finds a new way to procrastinate. You see, my brain sees me trying to fix this flaw as a challenge and so far I always lose and the procrastinator inside me always wins.
Part of the issue is that when I sit down to finally do all the stuff I had been putting off or even future things that aren’t important now but will be in the future, I find that I don’t have the ability to focus on anything. My stress eats me up and leaves me with very little done and even less time. I’m not going to lie, this happens way too often.
While goals with deadlines fill me with stress, goals without them always never get done. We have all been there, there is something that you want to do but eh, it can wait until a better time… but that time never comes.
In high school, it came up that, one of my friends, who had significantly better grades than me, never struggled that much with procrastinating. I was very confused, as I would say procrastination is probably my biggest challenge and not to exaggerate, but ruins my life every day. She kept going and just said when she has to do something she shuts everything out and just does it. I tried to take this advice and incorporate it into my life. Well… much easier said than done… But ! after many attempts, I made progress. It doesn’t always work but I’ve learned how to control stress and get through the challenges every day that pileup.
I believe in just doing it. Hearing every excuse in the world to not do something and telling yourself to suck it up and focus on something else for a while. I learned to trust myself. If I need to do something and I am telling myself to do it, I learned to stop making comments about why it sounds unexciting and trusting that I know that there is a benefit. I believe in doing
A few years ago, my dad and I decided to learn to snowboard. The first day sucked but as I learned to balance myself, I relied on only being able to lean one way. It was okay at first while I was still getting the hang of things, but the longer I went the longer I went without being able to turn a certain way and the scarier it got. I would always say that on the next run did work on it but run after run the days would go by and I still didn’t know how to turn properly. I remember one run in particular I fell and I was watching others pass by, all being able to turn and I grew furious at myself. I had been wasting so much time just waiting to hopefully get better but not doing anything about it. I told myself that I had enough and no matter how much I was struggling I had to keep trying to turn correctly. Yes, I didn’t do that well, but by the end of the day, I could do it. I realized it took me significantly longer waiting to learn than actually learning.
I believe in telling yourself to get up and go, that tomorrow is no different from today and not making any excuses for myself. While I do believe I will be a procrastinator forever, I know that if it is something I really want, I will look at myself in the mirror and tell myself to just do it.