Summary: A little story about procrastination and writing.
Date: March 2026
Quote: "When you get home, you feel like you could write a hundred different stories. All of them good. Your brain is overflowing with ideas. Finally! By the time that you get your shoes off, though, they’ve already disappeared."
WAKE UP, STAY IN BED for way too long. As exhaustion nearly lulls you back to sleep, think of something you could write about. All you can come up with is a metaphor for the weight underneath your eyes, the grease of your hair. Others make it seem easy: shower, eat a good-looking, healthy breakfast, make yourself smell like vanilla using expensive lotions and perfumes, have coffee or tea, but don’t add sugar or anything like that. Light a candle, sit down, let feelings flow over you, put words down on the page.
Instead of doing all of that, you get on your phone and watch other people do it for you, and then you watch cute videos of someone else’s cat, even though you have your own, sleeping by your feet. You watch someone who’s trying to make it in life as a creative, and you know they will be able to do it, because they do everything you don’t. You tell yourself that it’s fine that your morning has gone to shit, again, because you aren’t a morning person anyways. But, if you’re not a morning person, then what kind of person are you?
Skip school, or work, or any of your other responsibilities that require social interaction. Because other people will never be able to understand you like you understand yourself.
Go for a walk, don’t let yourself think at all during it. Play a song you only kind of like, one which used to inspire you endlessly. As you walk along a gravel path and watch the blooming Spring flowers, you feel good. Refreshed. You feel like going outside has made you a better person. Your failed morning is forgotten.
You’ve been on this path before. In the Summer, you watch as the flowers bloom and the trees turn green. In the winter, you watch as the grass turns dull and bluish, as the trees empty, as the snow appears. You’re right where you need to be in the world.
When you get home, you feel like you could write a hundred different stories. All of them good. Your brain is overflowing with ideas. Finally! By the time that you get your shoes off, though, they’ve already disappeared.
Fill your days with little tasks that don’t have anything to do with writing. Think about writing as you pick up a book that’s much better than anything you will ever write, think about it while eating, while resting, while feeling guilty about how much you rest in a day, while you wake up. You dread writing, and yet you know that you do not want to live a life in which you don’t put down your thoughts and experiences on paper.
Sit down at the end of the day and weave a story in which all of your problems aren’t your own. Make them pretty and easy to digest. Dump everything you’ve ever thought about on the page, look at the words, see where you have gone wrong. Act like you’re a better person than you actually are, admit that you’ve been wrong. But also that you’ve been wronged, too.
You don’t want to have children, you fear that you might hand off your issues to another person, that you might dirty a clean slate. In a way, though, that’s already what you’re doing every time you sit down at your desk. It’s addictive.
When you finish up your writing, you have to go to bed, because you waited until the last possible moment to write. You lay in bed and try not to think about the fact that your words will never sound as good on paper as they sound in your head. About how, along with everything else, writing is starting to feel like a chore.
Right before you drift off to sleep you come up with an idea, a quote, and a feeling of freedom washes over you. But it’s late, and you can’t be bothered to get up to write it down, so you just let sleep take you, knowing that you might not remember it tomorrow.