Gold Medal Time Waster

Ok come on now...something has got to give!
One cannot continue on a trajectory of ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’ and actually SUCCEED. Most days I feel like I don’t, other days I feel like Im hanging on with finger tips. Sometimes, but not very often, Im there in whole, only to find the pieces slipping as night falls, my day ends and I have achieved nothing. Not just ‘a little something’, but absolutely nothing.

I’ll give you an example.

School: I knew for three weeks that my final submission was coming up. I spent every night sitting in my study adding to the final submission, slowly but surely building towards a finished piece. Then something happened. One day I went into the study and I sat there. I picked up my Stanley knife and my scale rule, and I just looked at my half built model.
Nothing I could do could force me to finish it.
For hours that day I tried to build a second floor, so I gave up and tried to finish my floor plans. No success there either. I tried to make progress on my sketchbook. All I achieved that day was a ‘to do list’, of things to finish before submission. How contradictory!
As night fell that evening, Jimmy asked me how things were going, and I said ‘Fine’. I was so ashamed that I had sat there all day and made not one iota of progress... hours and hours wasted. I found anything I could to distract me, I’d check my facebook account... 5, 10, maybe 15 or 20 times. Id write out a shopping list, using the internet to compare prices between supermarkets, Id do ‘research’ on design by watching youtube documentaries, then follow the you-tube trail to things completely unrelated. Id draw out a monthly budget for finances. Id make myself a cup of tea. Id have a shower... the third one that day. I was convinced that if I got these things out of the way, my mind would be clear to focus on my assignment.

As the hours passed, I had so much anxiety about getting it finished, that I couldn’t sleep. So I’d stay up all night working on my assignment, and of the 12 hours through the darkness, I perhaps worked for 4 or 5 of them. I was the least productive creature you’d ever encountered. I could not work at speed and I could not stay focussed. A thousand thoughts of all varieties and durations streamed through my mind constantly. I thought about what I had to do tomorrow, I things I wanted to buy, or when I should do things, or what people were doing, or where I wanted to be. I thought about the environment, about life and love, and getting fit, and saving money, and seeing that exhibition, and doing a course, and cleaning the study.
I twitched, I fidgeted, I bounced my leg up and down, played with my hair, I painted my nails, and then picked it all off again.
In the end, at dawn on the day of my submission, I was not finished. But being the chronic perfectionist I am, I simply could not hand it in half finished. I could not stand there in front of the class and tell people that I had ‘worked’ on it for hours and still not successfully completed it. I was too ashamed, embarrassed, guilty, all of those, and so disappointed that it wasn’t my best work.

So I did not hand it in at all.
For days I had been fighting these distraction demons, and I wasn’t even bothering to hand it in.

I sat in the car outside my work (Id stayed at the office all night to work on it) and debated with myself, convincing myself that I was going to fail anyway, and that the humiliation wasn’t worth it. So I drove home at 5am. Jimmy was expecting me home at 9am (after I had gone to uni to submit) so I drove down the road with the lights off, parked my car a little further away, and curled up into a little ball. I tried to sleep for about an hour in the car, but it was too cold. Then I decided to leave my assignment in the car, cover it up with a jumper, in case Jim walked past and saw it, and then I snuck into the house, took off my shoes, and crept into the lounge room. I slept on the couch for a few hours until an appropriate time when I could ‘come home’. He never knew.

Two weeks later my lecturer contacted me to ask why I had never submitted. She had been told my work was of the highest calibre, but that she could not second my grades to date unless she saw the work. I wrote to her telling what had happened, how some sort of shutdown mechanism had meant that I sat for hours unable to finish a single component of my final folio. I told her I was willing to accept a fail and repeat the unit. She disagreed that this was appropriate, and asked to see what I had done, and gave me a week. And you know what happened? In that week, I did nothing. Oh GOD i tried. I sat down every night, and did more allnighters, desperately trying to raise the quality of my work and even complete some of it. It took me days to do things that should have taken hours. Again, I was infinitely distracted, I even cooked elaborate meals and went to the gym, using my heath as an excuse to not tackle the task at hand. And yet again, it wasn’t until the final hours before submission, that I was working at a frantic highly strung out pace, desperately trying to finish. Unfortunately the anxiety of submitting was not enough to overcome the days I spent wasting time. And so even though I had a second chance, AND an extra week, I still suffered miserably. I’d done a little more, sure. But it still wasn’t finished.

Here’s the clincher.

I did finally submit, albeit incomplete, and I got my mark back... 75, and a Distinction.
waaaat?
Not only did I pass, but they were good marks, and the work wasn’t even finished! Instead of being happy for what I had, I couldn’t help beat myself up over what I COULD have achieved had I been able to stay focused.

And this seems to happen with every unit at uni that I have ever attempted. I get really good marks for the most part, and then there is a drastic decline as the work piles up. Ive failed/repeated more units than I care to count, yet when I successfully complete a unit, my marks are really good! I know I can do the work, its not hard. But something always stops me. I like to blame 'time', I like to say Im 'too stressed' juggling fulltime work and study, but other people do it just fine, so why not me? And the reality is that I have lots of time, no less than everyone else. I just don’t know how to use it.
Generally I just tell myself that Im lazy, or that this ‘shutdown’ mechanism is just how I cope, and that I’ll try harder next semester. But its too endless, and it never gets better. Sometimes I try to talk myself out of it altogether – ‘as much as I want to complete this degree, I just don’t feel cut out for study. I almost didn’t pass year 12 for the exact same reason! I did great for the first 6 months then one by one it all fell apart and I only scraped through based on earlier grades, maybe I should take another path?’

And thats just school.

What about work? Oh don’t even get me started. I used to love my job, now I find it difficult to make it through a day. I am in constant fear that I’ll be found out for the things I am behind on, or haven’t done. For the love of gawd I cannot get or stay motivated, and the only things that I can achieve are short little menial tasks. Sometimes it goes up and down throughout the month - usually worse in the middle, and I actually used to think it was hormonal! Kinda still do.

And it gets worse;

*I always have a million thoughts in my head and I can mull over three or four completely different topics at the same time. I even consider myself a good writer, but I constantly have to make side notes on my screen because Im thinking too many topics ahead, jumping paragraphs, and I don’t want to lose those thoughts.

*Its difficult to initiate tasks, because its easier to not start, than to stop halfway through.

*I’ll sign up for a short course (three so far), and even if Ive paid money, I usually pull out/stop going after a few weeks.

*I end up working long hours but doing the same work as everyone else

*”I’ll do it tomorrow” is my mantra

*I can fluctuate quickly from genuinely sad or disappointed with life, to an intense focus on right now, and being happy being in the ‘right now’, but always with a million things to plan. MY boyfriend jokes that Im like a yo-yo, and he can almost see my mind working at a million miles an hour, when I should be relaxing. And relaxing IS very difficult, I feel guilty if Im not ‘on the go’. And its gotten progressively worse over the past 3 or so years, because the moment things start to appear calm, I start adding things into my life to be/achieve/do, to fill it up.


As the weeks pass it seems to have greater and greater impact on my capacity to get things done. I cant get myself to the gym, I am never ever at work on time, my house is a mess (or its the kind of clean where everything is stacked ‘neatly’ in piles a foot high, or shoved under my bed) and I make endless to do lists, wish lists, and budgets that are never ever achieved.
Im even procrastinating right now.
Im despairing over the things that are behind or overdue or imminent so I take time out to write about it.
What am I?
Nuts?!

Feels like Im going crazy.