The Feeling of Procrastination

If I now am able to feel the discomfort of writing and can allow myself to feel it and don't have to flee from it, does that mean that I have vanquished procrastination?

Ha ha ha, aren't you cute?

In a word: no.

But I have noticed what procrastination feels like.

And here's what procrastination feels like: nothing. Procrastination, I'm discovering, is a way of passing time without feeling anything. I can get wrapped up in web surfing or Game or whatever, and while I'm doing it, the experience happens in my head only. There is no associated feeling. Time simply passes. My attention is on what I'm doing. And I'm comfortable in that state.

Interestingly, until I really examined it, I would have said that procrastination feels awful, but that's not true. In procrastinating, I am choosing the anodyne comfort of numbness over the sometimes terrifying experience of actual moment-by-moment feeling. Upon real examination I saw that it's the recognition of procrastination that feels bad. And frequently the response to that recognition is to dive right back into procrastination. Ah, welcome numbness.

From that perspective, I began to wonder if procrastination is merely the name for a particular manifestation of not-feeling. Perhaps an essential numbness has been my practice for years, and procrastination is merely the form it takes when I think I should be working. Actual creative work always entails risk--risk and vulnerability being at the heart of every creative endeavor--and perhaps that level of risk means that there is no way to avoid the feelings of fear and the like that arise in that space. Numbness in that space obviates the work--it becomes simply impossible. And so maybe procrastination is what arises in the space of intention to work while (actively or passively) refusing to feel. Words simply won't come. Hello, Game.

If that's true, then what explains the however-many hundred-thousand or million words I've written over the years? How did I manage to write them if I was so numb?

Let me propose that unawareness of feeling is not the same thing as numbness. No matter how successful the practice of numbness/not-being-present, sometimes the will to create pushed me beyond it, and there the essential need to be present and vulnerable forced me to some degree to feel.

Energetically, it occurs to me that maybe this is what was going on: I was forced to feel--writing demands it--but the feelings were unpleasant: uncertainty and fear and the like. As such, I had two mechanisms for dealing with them: one was to fight to avoid feeling too acutely, to ignore the feelings or to push them away, which demanded a fairly substantial amount of energy. The other was to not feel them, to return to numbness, which is easier. One manifested as work that tended to burn me out, the other was long periods of procrastination.

I notice I procrastinate less now, but it still happens all the time. And it still feels comfortable and familiar and ... nothing. It has always felt like this.

But writing has not always felt like this.