A personal problem

I have a problem. (To be honest, I probably have a lot of problems. But we’re going to talk about a specific one today.) I am a lifelong procrastinator. I have become so practiced in the art of procrastination, I could easily win an Olympic gold medal in it. Odes, missives, legends, and sonnets could be written to the practiced art of procrastination at which I have come to excel. My procrastination knows no bounds. It is among my super powers (shamefully). It’s definitely not something I should brag about, but, as you’ll quickly learn, I’ve embraced it in such a way that it seems to serve me well (and by that I mean, it is not serving me well).

There are times when I procrastinate to the point that it’s almost paralyzing. Mind you, I don’t think anyone else is aware of this paralysis. But I know it’s there. Over the years, I’ve learned to compensate for this paralyzing procrastination. If you asked people with whom I work, nobody would know that I sit and chew on a project until there is no flavor left in it, before I can make myself get started. They won’t be able to tell you that I have found myriad ways to fart around instead of doing what needed to be done. I have managed to take staring at a computer screen to a new level. And yet, I rarely (if ever) miss a deadline. I wouldn’t dare. Because, another neurosis that I have flirted with for years is perfectionism. You cannot even begin to imagine what it does to your head when you cannot make yourself start on a project that you know has to be perfect. Who created this monster (me!) and why do I continue to indulge her?!

I recently had to prepare talking points for the CEO of my company. I spent a week, easily, worrying about writing the talking points, instead of writing them (these were answers to five questions that I myself had written!). The day before I had to prep my CEO on the talking points, I spent with a sick feeling in my stomach, unable to answer simple questions. (Did I mention that I was the one who came up with the questions in the first place?!) I wrote a sentence. Then I had a meeting. Then I looked at the sentence I had written skeptically. I deleted it. I wrote it again. I edited it twice. I still had not answered the question I had written. I stared at the screen. I added another sentence. Then it was time for lunch. Which I couldn’t really eat, because of how ridiculous I was being. 

I have been this way since I was a child. I know what I have to do. I even know how to do it. I think through all the millions of ways to get it done. But what I cannot do is find a way to make myself get started. Until the moment when it has become so painful that I have lost hours. Days. A week of sleep. I have given myself nervous diarrhea. I have not eaten (or, alternately, I have overeaten) in the name of avoidance. But none of it has made me actually get the damn thing done. 

I have a particularly vivid memory of a solar system project that I allowed to languish unattended for weeks. I think it was sixth grade, but maybe it was fifth...it doesn’t matter. It could be any project in any year of school (or life). I had to build a model solar system. I’m pretty sure it was due on a Monday. I’m also pretty sure we had been given something like three weeks to complete it. And I’m pretty sure that on Saturday afternoon, two days before it was due, I “remembered” and told my parents. A chorus of “goddamits” ensued along with a trip to the craft store, several rounds of hysterical crying (my own, not my parents...though they would’ve been fully justified, had they chosen to), and the rest of the weekend was spent building the damn thing. 

The worst part about the whole story is that it turned out really well and I got a good grade for it. My own procrastination, including anticipatory diarrhea, fits of hysteria, and parental torture, had paid off. So, when my mother said, at the end of the torturous weekend, “I hope you learned your lesson,” I most certainly had not. Thirty five years later, that holds true. This is how I have become conditioned to not just work under pressure (mostly of my own creation), but to excel at it. 

Another example -- and this one is even worse, so brace yourself -- was my senior thesis in college. Anyone who has ever done thesis work knows it’s (at least) a semester-long undertaking. You can imagine where this is going. It started off wrongly, because I was forced to take my thesis course in the fall, instead of the spring like everyone else, because I would be student teaching during the spring semester. This meant there was only one course option to choose: Modernism in Literature. Oh, the misery of the authors I was stuck reading for that course. Conrad, Joyce, Wolff, Mansfield . . . some of the most pretentious, mopey, horse’s ass writers who ever put pen to page (in my humble, literary opinion). I mean, when was the last time you heard someone say Ulysses was their favorite book? You haven’t. Because it  was an excruciatingly painful read. (I majored in literature and, as a result, took many literature courses, read hundreds of books, and I can say with certainty that the books I had to read in that course were truly the least enjoyable--nay, detestable--that I read not only in my college career, but in my entire life. Sadly, they wouldn’t let me write my thesis on that.)

Anyway, I was in this awful course and had to choose an author around whom to focus my thesis. Somehow I landed on Katherine Mansfield and something about feminism, I think. I don’t really remember because I have blocked it out of my consciousness the way one does with a particularly traumatic experience. It didn’t help that the thesis process was designed to break someone like me. It requires advanced planning and doing things like developing a research list, writing notecards, doing an outline and abstract. It requires meeting multiple deadlines. I mean, why would anyone do such a thing when they can wait until the night before and take their haphazard notes and spin it into gold? But I played along, poorly, and did the pieces required of me. (I have a vague memory of spending time in the library with a stack of 3x5 cards the night before those were due…) And then . . . I waited until the night before and took my haphazard notes and spun it into gold (or at least gold plated metal). 

I remember it quite well. It was a Thursday night. Must See TV was on (back when everyone watched Friends and Seinfeld and ER every week). So I did, too. Then I retired to the “study closet” in the sorority house, which was nothing more than a tiny room under the stairs that had a computer and an old dot matrix printer, to write my paper. I think I started around 11:00 (after ER ended). I sat there, clicking away (because the computer definitely had one of those old keyboards with the particularly resistant keys that made that satisfying “clonking” sound every time you touched them) until somewhere around 4:00 a.m. I just couldn’t stay awake any longer. So I took a disco nap, got up at 6ish, and got back to it. I finished the 20ish-page paper in plenty of time. That is to say, I had time to proofread it and print it out before class. I truly cannot remember what on earth it was about (other than something about Katherine Mansfield). But I got a B+ on it, and my professor even commented on how astutely I understood Mansfield’s motivations (what?!), so in the end it doesn’t really matter, does it? 

My friends were astonished by the depth of my procrastination, as well as the grade I received as a reward. I think one of them had the audacity to say something like, “Can you imagine what grade you would’ve gotten if you hadn’t waited so long to do the paper?” At which I rolled my eyes and snorted. That is not how it works. 

Back to the CEO talking points. After lunch, I stared at the computer screen some more, and then got down to business. I wrote the answers in 45 minutes. I read them, reread them, edited them, stared at them again. Had another meeting, and fretted that I didn’t really know what I was talking about. Finally, I put the finishing touches on them, pulled the trigger, and sent them over to the CEO, with plenty of time to spare before the end of the day (at least 8-10 minutes).

During the prep call the next morning, where I walked her through the questions (that I wrote) and the answers (that I also wrote), the CEO was full of praise. “This is so thorough. I’m so glad to have such great information. I wouldn’t have thought of that.” Still, I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, “I hope you learned your lesson…” and knew that I hadn’t.