Apparently procrastination is a very effective tool that allows you to do high quality work in the smallest amount of time possible. As much as I use this for comfort when its 11.30 the night before an assignment is due and I’m just making a start on my third episode of Orange is the New Black for the evening, I think it’s probably a much deadlier safety net than most of us realise.

By using it to validate my laziness, I’m never giving myself a chance to not be lazy. The language around it – “I can’t start an assignment until I have the pressure of it being due the next day…” “I do my best work the night before…” etc – is so engrained within my approach that when I sit down to try and make headway on a task a few weeks out, my subconscious is excusing my Brown Cardigan browsing before I’ve even opened my laptop. The fact that I’m trying to get on top of things early seems to equate to deserving a break and a Kit-Kat before I’ve even started.

So now here I am, the night before class with Elliott and the gang, trying to find the creative juices needed to squeeze out four blog posts that don’t run along the lines of “I found blah’s reading interesting because he made a point about blah which is very relevant to blah”, and have me falling asleep before I can even click Publish.

Nothing has made me more acutely aware of my perfectionism like starting a blog. I started a WordPress account earlier this year that consists of about eight posts. Roughly half of these posts finish with something like “I’m making a promise to my blogging community (of 7 people) to continue to post at least once a week, no excuses”, with each of these posts written weeks or months a part.

Writing is what I love to do, and more importantly, what I would one day love to be paid to do, and yet I spend the majority of my time on the internet playing Tetris or googling how to make gluten-free vegan sugar-free caramel brownies (which I never have the ingredients for!) and as far away from WordPress.com as possible. I am so scared of publishing anything even slightly subpar that I very rarely publish anything at all. By the time I finally get myself sitting down to write, I’ve backspaced and re-written my opening sentence 17 times and it’s definitely time to find out what’s been happening at the Litchfield Correctional Facility.

I’m sick of pretending to be a writer who doesn’t write, I’m sick of doubting each word as I type it, sick of drowning in cliched metaphors, of moving between the extremes of ‘boring’ and ‘try hard’ as I constantly question each sentence.

The annoying thing is, is that I can’t even say that I’m just going to do it anyway. Clearly trying to pre-trick myself into it by holding myself accountable to the blogosphere has not worked so well in the past. I’ll probably jinx myself by proclaiming on here that I’ll be updating MediaFactory five times a day and then give up forever.

So what I’m going to do instead, is just try to challenge my language. Stop validating my behaviour as a “classic perfectionist trait”, or that I was a born procrastinator. And just be, someone who wants to write.

“I’m just like this cloud puppy, ready to bound into life head first.” – Not Louisa Keck