Why Procrastination is a Mask to Deeper Issues.

Excerpt from my upcoming memoir

Excerpt from The Midlife Shift

Though I had my notes, thoughts, and ideas on how to write the book, I still needed to sit down and do it. I wanted to finish it before my impending travels to Goddard College in June. However, it was now March, and I still hadn’t written a word.

The procrastination was not circumstantial but was deeper, masked by the many fears lying in my subconscious. During those arid writing months, I’d get my laptop out and proceed to spend the next few hours doing nothing but staring at the blank screen, followed by much ruminating on why I couldn’t write.

The truth was I shouldn’t have worried whether I wrote or not. My livelihood didn’t depend on writing. I was not contracted by any newspaper or beholden to any pressing deadline. I had no expected date of manuscript submission to an editor. I was self-publishing a book for me.

Yet during those few months of not writing, I ended each day full of guilt. I had linked my new authentic self ’s worth to writing. Thus, in not writing,I’d become nothing.

Finally, a week into March, I decided that I needed to do something about my lack of writing. What was the source of the procrastination? Why had I felt so bad when I stopped writing? Using some ideas from Julia Cameron again, I first gave myself permission not to write for a whole week.

Then I wrote in bold letters on an index card, “Why do I feel that I must create?” and carried it with me for a week. As is always the case when we focus our consciousness on a particular question or incident, many answers serendipitously arose—thoughts, conversations, articles, movies, books, and more.

I came across a simple but telling contribution from one of my favourite writers, poets and thinkers, Khalil Gibran.

In a letter to Mary Haskell penned on November 10, 1911,Gibran wrote:

“There is an old Arabic song which begins ‘Only God and I know what is in my heart’—and today, after rereading your last three letters, I said out loud, ‘Only God and Mary and I know what is in my heart.’ I would open my heart and carry it in my hand so that others may know also; for there is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed. We all want that little light in us to be taken from under the bushel. The first poet must have suffered much when the cave-dwellers laughed at his mad words. He would have given his bow and arrows and lion skin, everything he possessed, just to have his fellow men know the delight and the passion which the sunset had created in his soul. And yet, is it not this mystic pain—the pain of not being known—that gives birth to art and artists?”

Gibran’s words are so elegant that his wisdom never fails to strike me instantaneously. “There is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed.”

I meditated on that sentence for a while and realised that, like all human beings, I yearned to reveal my true inner self to the outside world. I wanted my madness to be seen. To be accepted. To be understood.

Creativity and writing were the driving force that helped me find my inner voice, the means through which I share my authentic self with the world. Through exposing my writing to public audiences I’ve learned I’m part of an interconnected whole. However, even though we are all connected, we are also unique beings.

As such, I felt a compulsive longing to show my individuality with writing. Just like a peacock is proud to display his colourful array of feathers, we naturally do the same. It is an aspect of our evolutionary psychology. There is no ego or shame. “This is who I am,” we say.

Little wonder then that my writing stalled. There was a lot at stake for me. I was afraid to reveal my inner core to the world, thinking that most readers would judge me as not being good enough. The three-month timeline also didn’t help as I put undue pressure on myself.

But with Gibran’s definition of creativity and the understanding I got from why I was writing, the shackles came off. I was writing the best book I could, the one that only I could write. Perhaps I was no Yeats or Hemingway, but I was me. The poetry book was good enough for me. The self-help book was good enough for me. That was all that mattered.

I could only show off the feathers that were unique to me.