On Second Thoughts

If Procrastination were something visible, tangible—some actual creature that keeps us from our better selves—I believe it would be a terrible shape shifter. Maybe something like one of those Grow A Boyfriend’s: just add time and one day it will be large enough to control you. It would begin as something harmless; a bunny, whisper soft and vulnerable and endearing and completely harmless. What does it matter how I put it off as long as it gets done, right? Perhaps it’s even important, right? I need this time for me, to rejuvenate.

Then. THEN. It grows ever so slightly, while your back is turned. You spin around and it saddens those big brown eyes at you and everything seems fine—it’s a rabbit, for crying out loud. And this game of signs continues while an unseen suspense grows, until one day you realize that it’s not a rabbit, it’s not just Procrastination, it’s big and frightening and ugly—and it’s all wrapped up in your fears. Fear has been keeping you from the work, the effort, the genuine caring that all successes in life spring from.

If I don’t really take the time to write, I’ll never fail at writing.

If I don’t send this letter, he won’t have the notion to hate me for suggesting that he’s wrong.

If I don’t dial unprecedentedly, I won’t be too-friendly-and-in-an-awkward-situation again.

So we distract ourselves with whatever triviality we choose for blanketing our fear while it grows. Hey, if I don’t see it growing at me, it’s merely remaining, isn’t it? Remaining to be dealt with when I’m better suited to face it. Facebook helps me stand up to it.

I am over these silly fears. Who ever came up with the idea of thinking twice about things? Often, I’ve found that thinking about something more than once only gives fear time to giftwrap a good idea with gaudy worries. And who wants that sort of packaging?

Give me back my unadulterated impulses.

No second thoughts, obviously.

Writer's Bloq.

I’ve tried so many times to write this essay. I feel that it’s there in me, somewhere, but discovering this elusive nook of eloquent secrets is much more difficult that I anticipated. I haven’t quite pinpointed what it looks like, which makes it difficult to search for. But really, I mean, come on—it’s about me, isn’t it? Shouldn’t I be the ultimate authority on myself, the best one to put my own thoughts into words?

Sometimes I think that the most difficult thing about personal writing is that I’ve read too much of others’ ideas. My mind has created a composite of everything I’ve ever known as a typeface for how my own story should look; because it has to have closure and it has to have an ‘aha!’ moment of startling realization and the characters must be developed and whoever writes it must have a complete and thorough understanding of her story and all the morals behind it, which she then applies in her own life and—presto!—she is the perfect person.

But my story is not perfect and God knows I’m not either. It feels impossible to pare down characters that I really know into short story figures and my ‘aha!’ didn’t knock the wind out of me with the kind of abruptness that seems appropriate for normal climaxes. I’m not sure how the story ends or even exactly where it begins. The only thing I’m sure of is that what I think it should be and what it is don’t seem to align so well.

I wonder.

I wonder how I would go about writing it if I had never read another’s story.

I guess I would just start typing.