I Found a Simple Trick to Overcome My Chronic Procrastination

The trick is to listen to the space within me

Photo by Juan Vargas on Pexel.com

It’s the same every time.

It’s always the same.

Day one:

I sit down to write or research an article I’m writing.

First hour in:

I realise I don’t know how to write.

I remember Rainer Maria’s Letters to a Young Poet and his perfectly-choreographed sentences; Remember how the chubby baby angels in my bones sing every time Margaret Artwood writes; Remember all the songs I’ve listened to, and the ether hidden in all the paintings I’ve ever seen.

I think about the movies that made me cry; think about all the poems that’ve ever been written, about all the poems I’ve read; Poems I never understood, but poems that’ve excavated rotting carcasses of flesh out of my soul.

You don’t know how to write, tiny devils within me whisper in response. You still have a long way to go, Assumpta.

I believe them. I always believe them.

And so, like any other person, I do the only thing I’ve ever known how to do.

I over-compensate.