Pondering Procrastination

I generally pride myself on my work ethic. For the most part, my days are pretty unstructured, and if I wasn't able to kick my ass into gear, I'd never get anything done. Of course, the downside to being a writer means that I'm never really off the clock; as much as I might try to keep a weekend work-free, if I have an idea or a deadline, all bets are off. But that's a fairly minor price to pay for something I love so much.

Yet as much as I do love writing, and my flexible schedule, the past week has left me wishing I had a regular job and could leave work at the office at the end of the day. I have all these ideas, and a few hard-and-fast deadlines, but here I am on a Tuesday morning, watching old episodes of "America's Next Top Model" and staring at my dusty coffee table. Maybe it would be more productive to throw in the towel on writing, at least for an hour, and just clean the apartment instead. At least that would yield tangible results.

It's kind of tempting to blame my laziness on my health. The past week has also brought an increase in the muscle spasms that can knock me backwards, necessitating hours prone on the couch with a heat wrap on my neck and searches through my stockpile of pain meds that conjure up visions of "Valley of the Dolls." Add to that a wonky wrist and toss an ice pack onto the couch alongside that heat wrap, and I have a somewhat compelling case for procrastination.

But I know I'm more than my pain; my brain hasn't been affected, even though my ability to write is somewhat compromised. Even though it's always been a balancing act between how much I want to accomplish and how much I actually can, I'm not ready to upset that ratio thanks to a bad week. Instead, I'll turn off the TV and retreat to the less-dusty kitchen table, where the distractions are minimal and the chairs just uncomfortable enough that I don't want to linger. And I'll start the all-too-familiar cycle of writing and deleting, revising and tweaking until the words are just right and I can finally feel like a writer again.