Journal #2 : Procrastination
In my last entry I talked about my inability to focus and how it leads to distraction and isolation and this state of “mental fixation”. I also mentioned my desire for wanting to distract myself from life. This is because life, to me, has always been something that should “ideally” be easy, but in reality never is. Even though it’s a perceptual thing, life is what you make of it, my perception of my own life has always been complicated.Growing up in a small town in California still easily provides you with numerous types of family. But even early on I realized that my family was very different from all the other families I knew. To begin with, my parents were much older than all of my friends parents and so were my brothers and sisters. As the youngest of seven kids, my oldest five siblings range between 16 – 21 years older than me. And being that by the time I came around most were already out of the house, I grew up barely knowing them. The only sibling I knew and was close with was the sister that I grew up with who was still 6 years older than I was.
If this wasn’t weird enough, because both my parents were much older than a majority of my friends parents, they (my friends) didn’t understand what I meant when I said my parents were sick. From about fourth grade on I faced the reality that my parents were not well and I felt like I could lose them at any point in time. It just isn’t something most kids think about. Your parents are supposed to be there for you all your life and you are never supposed to realize that your parents aren’t invincible. But when I was about 10, my mother started to get sick. We found out she had cancer and from that point on I realized just how different my family was from all of my friends. My mother was not well and my dad, although he far from acted like it, was also dealing with other health situations.
Because I realized that I could lose either, or both, of my parents at any time, I was determined to spend as much time with them as I could because I felt that my brothers and sisters had had the unfair advantage of being born earlier and knowing them better. So everyday after school I would come home and lay in bed with my mom and watch tv, or sit out back with my dad and just talk with him. This is something that I’m grateful for. Although, at the same time I realize now that even back then I had a huge desire to distract myself from things because part of the benefit of spending so much time with my parents was the fact that I evaded having to do my homework.
Later, perhaps because I was so keen on distracting myself, I developed a bad habit of procrastinating. Or rather, maybe it was always sort of there. My dad likes to remind me that I was always telling him that I would do something “later” even as a little kid. So maybe it was already there at some point early on, but over the years I perfected it. I put off homework until the next day in class, and because the teachers sent you to “detention” during break to do your homework instead of going out to play, I was fine with missing some play time if it meant I didn’t have to do my homework at home. Home, for me, had become some place school couldn’t touch. It was a whole other world and I liked to keep it that way. The kids at school didn’t know much about me at home and at home my parents were usually too busy worrying about other things to ask me about school, unless I got a bad grade. So all I had to do was keep my grades up by quickening my pace at homework until I could fit it in under the break time and keep my grades up and all of my other time was free for me.
The problem with that is that it all changes when you get into junior high. And, of course, like every pre-teen / teenager, life became even more complicated… So as I struggled to build my relationships both at school and at home, I realized that if I was going to succeed I would have to integrate both worlds somehow. I was going to have to bring school home and home with me to school as much as I didn’t like it… By high school I had perfected procrastination to a science and realized that I only did well when I did, which didn’t help matters any. I only seemed to pass a test if I studied right before it. I only did well on a paper if I wrote it right before it was due. I only understood something I read if I read it right before we talked about it. Procrastination, while it kept me from experiencing a lot of things, had this high and seeming positive effect of providing me with the right amount of confidence to do something.
And here is where I start to realize just how my problems seem to interconnect with each other. Perhaps it’s also where I started to realize what lay underneath each problem.
