“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

--T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock


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The Awesome Power of Procrastination




*Trigger Warning: self-harm

The power of procrastination is so awesome that even though I have been without Internet access for several hours and I have things that I think I want to do, I have spent that time lying on top of my bed thinking about how I would do all the things I want to do if I were to do them. Very productive. I think that the ideas I have are worth so much more in my head, I can fetishize every negative feeling and pretend that it makes me special or interesting in some way. But when the thoughts become words that I type out and read back, I realise how banal everything about me is. That's probably the real reason writing blog posts and writing in my journal gets a little harder every time. Here is a quick list of the things I should be doing right now:

  • On Tuesday I had a very intense dream that was terrifying enough to make me feel slightly separate from my body all week. Even now, everything feels a little unreal and abnormal; I haven't stopped thinking about the demon in that dream and the things he did to me. In the old days, I could be sure that a few slices of the forearm would jolt me back to reality, bring the feeling back in my brain. But I am hoping that writing is sort of like the same thing and that all I need to stop feeling like a bit player in someone else's nightmare is to finish this post. I wanted to turn the nightmare into a short story, but the more I think about the right way to do that, the less likely it seems. Everything I felt when I woke up was so urgent and overwhelming that I needed to share it with someone else, but now I think that there is no way someone hasn't already written a story like this with much more skill than I could ever hope to possess. I hope I follow through with this, I really do. This seems like the sort of story that is better out than in.

  • There was another writing prompt from the poetry class this week, we had to write a poem describing an object. It seems simple enough, but I didn't do it, I don't see myself as much of an imagist. I feel pretty bad about not doing the assignment even though it is optional, maybe the guilt will be enough to push me to write a few lines. It can't be as hard as I'm making it seem.
  • Today I got an idea for a poem about the way I used to fall in love. I've just had this idea of writing something about the Death of The Ideal(in part because it's sort of mentioned in Ligotti's Notes on Writing Horror: A Story) exploring all the ways I have changed that make that kind of idealism impossible for me now. I had a lot of crushes in my wild and carefree youth, but there was always one who stood out in my mind. There isn't anything exceptional about him but the way I felt about him was exceptional to me, I had never been so brave and careless with my heart. Over the years, a fictionalised version of him started to form in my head and stayed there for some time. I want to write about that too, how I managed to create an entire person in my head based on some very skewed perceptions I had of a person I don't know and never really knew and what it would mean to let that mental image go. Would I lose the part of myself that really believed she loved him and became brave as a result?

I'm still not sure if having a schedule is better for me than just writing when I feel inspired. I'm still not sure if this is even comparable to real therapy. For the moment, I don't have a choice so I should try to make it work.

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