Struggling against myself

Well, this is more or less becoming normal, isn't it? It was the night of April 21st. It was that afternoon that I realized I had a report to hand in the very next day. In the end I did manage to do just that before the teacher left school but what happened the day before was rather interesting. I recalled two TEDx talks as it happened. One was about procrastination and the other about addiction; two things that have been undermining my performance as a student. So... There are several reasons why procrastination happens. For one, when one is daunted and don't know where to start, when one doesn't believe the task is going to be painful to do and that there is solace to be had in the face of failure; "I'm not dumb, I'm just lazy". The new thing I've gotten about addiction there was that this idea that the mind tries to distract itself from itself.

Here's how those points become relevant; when I was sort of distracting myself with ponies, music or green tech news despite the hours passing while knowing what needed to be done. For one, through experience I know that reports don't get made in a day or a night for that matter so confidence was low. They can be pretty frustrating to make because I have this tendency to sort of panic at any hint of ambiguity or uncertainty, especially when under pressure. I just knew it was going to be anything but fun. Comfort eating was on my mind for quite a while. What that is, it's the act of eating something delicious (often junk food) so that the stimulation from the taste provides temporary relief from whatever's causing a person emotional distress or from stress itself. Deciding not to do that and instead to tune in to the emotional pain that was driving me to go eat (on a tight budget no less) in the first place so what I did was go for a walk. As I did, for a while at least, I wasn't distracting myself from myself, from my feelings or my thoughts so the full blow was felt as intended. Maybe if our paths happened to cross it would've looked like I was just avoiding eye contact but I was crying inside from shame and thoughts of being incompetent, of not doing good enough. In time however, my mind grew increasingly distractable unconsciously and before I even realized it, in fact. My thoughts became scattered and irrelevant despite trying to focus on the situation at hand. Then back at campus, my parents called as usual. I never tell them when I'm hurting because I have zero confidence they'll be helpful so of course, I lie that I'm alight, I lie that I'm doing perfectly fine. But lying to them stresses me, I noticed... and before I knew it, while still talking to them on my Nokia 1616 cellphone, I began to pace around on my toes where parts of my feet needed to land with specific timing and succession. It was weird... It's like my mind or my brain, whichever of the two, is using every trick up its sleeve to tune the stress out be it by attention deficit or by some obsessive compulsion that makes me focus on doing something mundane and irrelevant.

The thought or the act of losing touch with reality is something I despise to see in others and moreso myself or when other people get condescending about it; "who needs [insert anything relevant] when you've got swag? Yolo". My deepest sympathies to those who wish they could control or tame themselves or wish that the world around them was much more helpful so that they wouldn't need to be like that. At the extreme of this occurrence is insanity which itself is something I've come to see a coping mechanism.

TEDx talk: Why We Procrastinate. Duration: 10 min.
TEDx talk: The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power. Duration: 19 min.