Procrastinate: To defer action.
I believe we have all experienced procrastination at one point or another. This can mean deferring action of any kind, school work, cooking, seeing friends, or even working on the goals and dreams we have set ourselves. The outcome of this is always disappointment in ourselves or blame as to why we are incapable of working like others. But we also need to realize that we each experience life differently.
In my experience, I have been a master procrastinator for as long as I can remember. I used school to define myself. This was the number one priority in my life for a long time. I used school and academia to assert a sense of importance to myself like I had a lot going for me, but I was not even doing that right. Procrastination for me looks like a lot of incomplete ideas, things I thought of but never really put much effort into completing. I am always aware of what I am not doing but the thoughts of not doing it quickly turn into anxiety and depression, feelings of hopelessness and failure. Am I anxious and depressed or do I just fear what people will think of my inability to do what I said I would do?
I have been thinking about how to gain more control over my workflow and creativity. This has led me to think more about how procrastination is caused by our inability to deal with failure or people’s judgments. As a writer, I have always relied on other people’s opinions to define how my work is supposed to be perceived and not by my standards of accuracy and sharing valuable information to a community that supports and understands my vision.
I have concluded that procrastination happens because we are too afraid of what others will say about our creative efforts and our willingness to fail at something we eventually hope to become experts at one day. I have never been one to openly share my thoughts about anything mental health-related, especially on this website, but in the time that I have been procrastinating, I have observed that I can only achieve my goals if I share every aspect of my creative process.
This piece is not exhaustive but I do hope that it will help me write more like it. I hope to use my website to explore different topics that still relate to sustainability and creativity at large. Through Intentionality, I hope to achieve much more than raising awareness of the climate crisis. We are living through difficult times, and I hope that intentional writing will shed light on all these challenges while providing simple and achievable solutions.
