Procrastination

Throughout my five years at high school, procrastination has been both my best friend and worst enemy. It’s always there holding my hand through all my really important assessments, the sort of ones that my entire future -- right down to what I’m eating for breakfast thirty years from now -- is going to be based on. It has been with me during the return of every failed mark I’ve received, during every belated birthday present I’ve given, and during every late return I’ve made to the video store. And it is still with me at the moment, as I am typing this blog.

I am incomprehensibly good at procrastinating. It is the one thing on this unforgiving planet that I was born to do. I can procrastinate with the same effortlessness Michael Jordon conveys as he sinks hoops. I mean, if procrastination was a school subject or a possible choice in career, I would be very successful it -- far more than Leonardo Da Vinci and Douglas Adams were in the field, even. In fact, if there was such a thing as the ‘procrastination business’, I would be the Bill Gates of it, donating billions of dollars I earned procrastinating every year to a charity of my choosing.

It happens to be my remarkable knack for procrastinating that I’m holding responsible for the huge amount of time it has taken me to write another blog post. Ironically, procrastination also happens to be what caused me to write this post in the end (at the moment I should be painting for my art folio). It’s beginning to feel like the only time I ever get anything done is when I’m working at something to delay having to work on something even worse instead.

My art, for example. The only time I ever feel like I paint and draw is when I’m in my other, non-art related classes. Then again, I’d do almost anything to escape from the mind numbing drone that is Shakespearian English and learning how to identify symbolism in war poetry.

I think, in a funny way, procrastination is escapism. All of the movies and art and writing I’ve done are all ways for me to escape reality. The second I start watching films, painting pictures and writing stories because I have to, they lose their appeal. They become chores I feel like I get no great reward or satisfaction out of, so I avoid doing them for as long as I can.

Procrastination is my foolish attempt at steering my space ship away from earth so I can stay in orbit that little bit longer. It’s my red button, hidden in a secret compartment beside my seat.

What I absolutely need to know is why I press it so much. Has it become an addiction like reality television, video games and pornography? Am I addicted to floating in empty space? To feeling bored? Has procrastinating become my mood stabilizer? My Lithium?

It's a scary thought.