A couple of days ago I watched this TED Talk video on procrastination. It covered the fine balance between the responsible side of one's ego and the part that is more interested in having a good time, the 'monkey'. Most of the talk was about how important it is to keep the monkey restrained, lest one ends up spending hours watching fun videos or browsing Wikipedia.
This made me think about how this all works for me. Those many days spent just aimlessly clicking around on the internet, working up the motivation to do anything, was that the monkey having fun instead of facing up to the obligations in life?
The thing there is that I did not and still do not have fun while fighting against this procrastination. It's more of a struggle, trying to get myself to a point where I can do anything at all, while feeling the weight of my existence and all that I'm failing at threatening to crush me.
The ironic thing there is that I have never been the type to procrastinate. As a child and teenager I was always working on big projects with seemingly endless energy. Then, starting with my parents divorcing and moving around the country that all began to change.
I still tried to continue projects within the limitations of losing access to the farm's resources and space, but as the pressure to resume studying or get a job increased, I abandoned most projects in favour of self-improvement projects, from driving lessons to figuring out my next steps in life. This mostly resulted in me slipping into a bad depression.
Cut off from the environment where I grew up, without any clear goals in life or how to start feeling happy again, I simply drifted along for a while until finding out about being intersex. To me that seemed like the key to solving a lot of issues and questions I had about myself. I would get medical help, get answers, maybe surgery or something, and things would work out.
Fourteen years later I still don't really have answers, and have many more questions than those with which I started. Worse, because of the treatment by doctors and psychologists, I now have severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This is like depression times a thousand.
How does one keep motivated when one is beset by depression? When the expectation is that no matter what one does, it will just backfire? That everything which one attempts or does is futile? When one feels as if there's no point to one's existence, and it'd have been much better if one had never been born?
No monkey there, more like this black monster that sits on one's shoulder, discouraging and harassing one. Why even start that task when you know it's futile, or won't work anyway? Or maybe it's just that you know that you are incapable of doing it, or will just screw it up, or others will do a much better job, regardless of how many times you managed to pull off that same task with great success.
It's still procrastination, but unlike monkey-based procrastination here forcing and nudging the affected person will not help. Instead counteracting the black monster will have the best effect, by giving the person back their self-worth, their sense of reality and with it their reason to live.
It's not that we do not want to, it's more that we physically cannot, unless someone else gives us that little push and assists us so that we can get away from the black monster and with it the feeling of being incapacitated.
Maya
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