Lessons in Procrastination by Giselle Vriesen
For me, writing is a meditation, an escape, a beautiful exhale—and a torture. When I was a kid, writing was a means of escaping the mundane. I wrote to create worlds where there was nothing I couldn’t do, no-one who didn’t love me. In reality, I was the odd duck, the only Black girl in my class on a remote gulf island. I wrote to make myself the main character instead of a sidekick to the white girls who dominated the stories I consumed. Writing was how I became something I wasn’t, important, loveable—white. All of my main characters were white and all of the stories I wrote were centred around white ideas. It wasn’t until I was seventeen, when I realized what I was doing was an outcry of oppressed internalized racism, that I started writing main characters who looked like me—who really were me. And that’s when the trouble began.
Writing stories as an escape is the most beautiful delusion because the more you practice it, the more authentic it feels. So, when I started writing as myself, for myself—truly, writing stopped being an escape and started to be a torture. Suddenly, the fictional characters I continued to create were experiencing hardships skin-close to home, suddenly it became harder to get a story out of my body. When I was eighteen, I started experiencing something I hadn't ever felt before: complete waterlogged self-doubt. I questioned everything that my characters did or experienced, editing them as much as I edited myself, to the point that my stories became boring, even to me. In my effort to not inflict more pain, I cut my creativity off from the parts of me that were truly expressive.
Last year I started to collect ideas for a new novel I truly cared about—and held off on making the rough draft for months for fear of ruining it in revision. Ideas of being inauthentic or boring, and the increasing notion of unworthiness kept my desktop free of any new documents. Until I got a scholarship to a writing course hosted by a Black writer I really admire, and had to drag myself through it to plan and draft my book. Having a community of mostly BIPOC peers in that group, plus learning from the Black teacher, was phenomenal. Seeing other people like me facing the same struggles carried me past a lot of my limitations
The result of pulling myself through was incredible. I made a creation literally ripped from the most tender parts of my body but obviously—I couldn’t revise it for five long months. All the while, it sat complete in its fledgling form like a premature bird fallen from its nest—collecting dust in a notebook at the back of my shelf. It haunted me, chirping through the house “you whiny bitch, just revise me and get it over with.”
I knew that in the past I had drafted books and revised them down to the bone, subconsciously removing anything authentic for fear of sharing my true feelings. I didn’t want to do that to this book, so I paused deliberately.
Then, I procrastinated in the most productive way I could: I knitted socks without a pattern and became obsessed with making animation on my IPad; I watched the Umbrella Academy and ate lasagna. By the time I was done, I knew there was one ghost haunting all of my past projects, tainting them before they were ever finished—and I was ready to face it.
The idea that I’m unworthy of success was easy to come to. The more subliminal core of it though, the ghost whispering, that no matter what I do, no matter how much I achieve—I’ll never be enough, was what I had to face. To move through it I had to face difficult facts—my ghost is a gaslighting liar and just because it has my voice doesn’t mean it is me.
The women in my family aren’t big on climbing, they’re big on sitting down and pretending to be small. I come from two lines of racialized women raised on the notion that they don’t matter. They were told it so harshly that they told me the same thing—and I believe(d) it. Some part of me will probably always be struggling with that one foundational lie, it affects so many facets of my life. But, even though the women in my family don’t believe they can/could do anything, some of them still tried to push against that belief, only to fall backwards on it the same way I have—affirming their ideas of unworthiness and committing to silence and stillness as a result. So, I know firsthand and broadly what happens when you push a baby out and aren’t ready to deliver the afterbirth. I know that sometimes you just bleed out. That’s why I paused after I finished my first draft. I recognized it was time, not to stop, but to wait.
I think that procrastination is sometimes a gift. The urge to procrastinate helped me understand that the thing I was avoiding was more deep seated than the physical work in front of me. When I first took my procrastination as an opportunity to address and evict old ideas by facing them and their un-true ness, I realized how much opportunity for growth I really have. I let procrastination be a chance for me to sit down and talk through my limitations, before standing back up. Not victoriously stronger like Popeye, if the spinach was self-encouragement—but like a little tree that got struck down by the wind and stretches its leaves out anyways.
So, if you’re wondering if I still procrastinate, the answer is YES. I hesitated to finish this article. But, now at least I’m no longer trying to make my hesitation to write a problem, or label it as proof of my inadequacy. I try to take it as an opportunity to overcome a previously insurmountable hill by taking it slow, forgiving myself if I think I’m late, and doing it anyways (eventually) with as much grace as I can—even if I still sort of feel like a failure along the way.
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Giselle Vriesen is a young adult writer, the Illustrator of The Moon In You, a period book for girls, and a Valentino Scholar of Tomi Adeyemi's The Writers Roadmap Course. She creates Anti-Racism resources for teachers and lives in the Cowichan Valley. Giselle has been published in The Cowichan Valley Voice.
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