Happy Wednesday, squiders. How are you?
This month WriYe’s prompt is: Define your biggest distraction and how you deal with it.
Ha. Haha.
I don’t necessarily have a specific distraction that draws me away from writing. What I have is a mindset issue, where I self-sabotage.
The self-sabotaging is frustrating on many levels, because it stops me from being as productive as I would like, and also the things I self-sabotage with are usually stupid things that aren’t worth my time.
(Some things that I do instead of what I am supposed to be doing: scroll memes, play repetitive flash games or Minesweeper, watch YouTube, read fanfiction, color on my phone app, troll tumblr and/or reddit and/or AO3, etc.)
(Each of these activities are fine if you want to do them and/or plan to do them, but when I do them they are almost always a procrastination technique.)
Now, arguably, some of the self-sabotage does stem from me over-taxing myself. I work and I have the small, mobile ones to raise, and often I am just tired, and sometimes despite the best intentions I simply do not have the energy to do whatever creative thing was on my list.
BUT I would argue that that is not the main problem.
Another part of the self-sabotage is avoidance. Let’s say I have to make a phone call I do not want to make. (I have no idea why phone calls are so anxiety-inducing. And I’m fine with them in general, but if it’s something weird or something that may have an unpleasant aspect to it, I have a really hard time working up to doing it.) So I need to make this call, but I don’t want to, and so I don’t, but I also can’t do anything else useful with my time because I feel guilty about not making the call, and so I procrastinate the hell out of everything (and then invariably by the time I work up to the call, the place has closed).
But some of it definitely stems from from…burnout? Self-doubt, like we talked about last week? Something where I am like “what is the point, no one cares, no one likes my stories and I am never going to get anywhere” which is frustrating on its own.
Sometimes I can just power through these moods, sometimes I can trick myself into it for a short time. Timers helps (work for so long, take so long of break), as do to-do lists. It helps if I just kind of stay in my own lane and don’t look at what sort of attention other people are getting. (What is the phrase? Comparison is the death of…? Hold on. Comparison is the thief of joy.)
But, man, if people have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
How about you, squider? What’s your distraction?
