Waiting for Simon

I know. This post is supposed to be about how Simon Le Bon is my David Cassidy. But do you remember #6 from my last post? About procrastination? Yep. It's smacking me around. Again.

Every once in a while I'm able to keep it at a low level hum. Unfortunately, more often it's full blown and weighing me down so that I don't feel able to get anything done and feel terrible about myself.  

Me feeling bad about myself. Sniff.

This year I had been doing really well and staying on top of things. Then spring hit, and I volunteered to judge five entries in a writing contest (each entry was 35 pages long -- argh!). And I also had to read a book that I didn't want to for my book group. And I signed up for an online writing class for which we had pre-work, and I was really stymied with the pre-work and feeling really inadequate. And I set a goal for myself to try to write a blog entry every week then wrote myself into a corner by saying I would write about whatever readers voted on (which was Simon Le Bon). And then, of course, work got really busy and I was needing to work a little overtime.

Life was feeling really heavy for a couple of months.

Life. Heavy.

I finally see the light.

After carrying 175 pages of contest entries around with me for almost two months, I finally forced my butt in front of the computer (deadlines are an amazing thing), read each one several times, scored them, added my comments/encouragement and turned them in. Whew!

And my book group met. So I confessed to the group that I was only able to read parts of the book.  

As for this blog, as you can see, I'm not holding myself to Simon. At least not for this post. I forgive myself and am going to put this one out. Then I'll finish writing about Simon.

Simon. Coming.

And the craziness at work has passed. Halleluia!

(Notice I haven't said anything about my online writing course? Now that I feel lighter, I feel able to tackle it. Maybe I also needed this extra time to let my mind work on the problem. Of course, now I'm not only two weeks late on the initial assignment, but I'm also behind on subsequent assignments. I'll just tackle them one by one.)

I'm so grateful that almost all of the items on that list were for things in my personal life. That's such a change from five months ago, when my list was even longer, and almost all of them were work-related and urgent and overdue and causing my back to spasm from stress and keeping me from sleeping well.

Here's a poem describing how it felt like to me at my worst last year. When I was completely overwhelmed and dragged down by deadlines. And my inner wild child, as my life coach describes her, was in full rebellion.

Weights
Those things left undone,
With deadlines,
That I must do,
That I am required to do,
And that I hate to do,
        Or which will require
                     a lot of my energy,
                                   or which I'm not...
                                                             ...ready
                                                                      ...to do.
                                                                               Yet.