The Personal Demons Rise Again

Ugh... (clearing throat)

This is going to be a lazy day. You can judge it by the millimeters of snot that slowly trickle out of my daughters' noses. You can count it by the sneezes and coughs, the microscopic droplets of germ-ridden saliva that fly through the air. You can hear it in their pinched speech, swollen and stuffy nasal passages muffling their words. You can hear it in their congested chests, phlegm rattling every time they cough or take a breath. Most of all, you will hear it in my whining about the sore throat I have from the drainage that took place while I was sleeping the sleep of the dead last night, my body now fighting off this same pesky virus.

I don't like colds. They slow me down, they ruin the day, they make it that much harder for me to concentrate on things (and I already have a hard time doing that here lately and I think I know the reason for it, but that's another matter altogether). In their initial stages, they slay any sense of motivation I may have had about anything at all. Coincidentally, I was pushing myself for a return to the Y after a week's absence. Now I have a convenient excuse to do nothing, should I choose to take that excuse. Of course, if I push myself and go, I risk passing my cold on to people, as well as exposing my sick children to healthy ones at Child Watch (the Y's very own daycare center). I also risk exhausting an already weakened body, giving myself no other option when I get home but to shower, eat, and lay on the couch the rest of the day.

So I've decided to stay home for my health's sake as well as others who aren't sick right now and take it easy. Besides, I have a project to work on with my daughter that is due tomorrow upon her return to school (she's off today because of the holiday) and I wouldn't want her to walk in unprepared. I know how I felt when that happened to me; in fact, it happened several times because I was never diligent about at-home assignments, and if I did mention them to my parents it was usually at the last minute when I was sweating bullets over its completion. If given the option to go back and do it over again, knowing what I know now, I might have been a more pertinacious pupil. Then again, I would've lost the lesson of what it feels like to be unprepared, to step in front of a class of my peers and have to do a presentation on a wing and a prayer, my lack of preparation obvious to everyone in the room. It is the precursory panic and resulting chagrin that I felt at the moment that now serves as the ultimate deterrent to doing things last-minute.

There are some things on which I still procrastinate, however. The laundry basket that sits in my living room for almost a week. Those clothes won't fold themselves but I think, "Eeeehhhh...I'll do it tomorrow." The piles of unopened junk mail on my office desk that need to be shredded. "Not today," I think. "I just don't feel like it. Besides, I have some writing to do." That would be true if I could sit down without a moment's interruption for a good three to four hours and maintain a stream of consciousness for that time period. If only. There are writers who have the ability to escape to a villa in Europe somewhere for four months at a time and write morning, noon and night, eating, sleeping and breathing their worlds, their craft.

Where is my villa? Where is my grand, uninterrupted idea? They are downstairs in a dark, cold basement, frowning at me each day I am absent. Or perhaps that is my conscience I see sitting in that revolving chair, tapping its foot on the floor with impatience, its brittle nails scraping the keyboard of my laptop, brow furrowed with frustration and disappointment when I don't sit down with it and completely dissolve from this reality and assimilate into another entirely of my own making. There is procrastination on that front as well, my excuse for it frequently being "I don't feel like it." I'm killing my creation with a lack of motivation, my lackadaiscical attitude. As a result, my story and I have become estranged; each time I return to it, it feels like an old friend I haven't seen in years, one to whom I just don't know what to say to break the ice and get a good conversation rolling, one that will help me get to know her again. Instead there is that lingering discomfort in the long periods of silence, that awkward wave of "hello" when I finally do come to see her, our dialogue stilted and uninspired. I end up with pages and pages of shit that I'm terribly tempted to highlight and delete, never to see them again and come back to the same spot I was in when I started. I have nothing to show for the time I put in. My attempt was a total waste.

I told all my readers once before in an entry titled "My Mental Villains" (Feb. 2010)that two particularly strong demons of mine were self-doubt and low self-esteem. They still plague me every now and then but procrastination is at the forefront lately, this little imp pouring a cocktail of lethargy down my throat as it strokes my hair and whispers sweet apathetic nothings in my ear. It's like a seduction really. The demon of laziness has me swooning right now.

Time to break the spell.