Lean on this Rock
I want to talk about anxiety, shame, and procrastination. I doubt I’m the only one who does this: I slowly built a list of things I have yet to attend to. It's mostly by accident. It's insidious. I didn't get to something, and then I don't have time, and surely tomorrow?
After a time, and many promises to myself, it becomes physically uncomfortable to think about them, so I do something to forget – you know, give myself grace and sit with something else. Or sneak into an alternate little reality where the tasks don’t exist, and my thoughts didn't accidentally brush them.
Right now, the list includes three people I need to follow up with, a volunteer thing I promised to do, and the fact I’ve been dodging my personal trainer’s messages. I spend a lot of energy justifying the avoidance: “Work has been brutal, I’m exhausted, I deserve to collapse in front of TV and not think about it.” And that’s not seldom true. Work is draining. (Or whatever I did instead of work certainly was.) But the drain is often self-inflicted: I skip meals, I don’t take breaks, and then I have no reserve left to actually handle the things I committed to.
What hurts most are the person-to-person failures. Once you start postponing replies and meetings, you also have to live with the fact that you’ve been disrespectful. You have to accept you're the kind of person who ignores long, thoughtful emails from people who care about you.
You're not a nice guy. No amount of guilty anguish will change that.
I have friendships where long silences are fine; we pick up years later, and it's so forgiving. But I don’t want to be a person who lets the meaning of life slip. Leaving friendships on hold erodes them. It makes you feel alone precisely because you’ve been the one to push people away.
Allowing yourself to neglect your friends throws the gates wide open to breaking promises. It pushes you over the edge and sends you tumbling down the hill to not following through.
We call this procrastination, but it's worse: it's how you see yourself, it's the reluctance to commit, the inability to plan ahead.
The cringe at the thought of those unread texts is a self-fulfilling verdict that you are not someone who can be counted on. It breeds sadness and loneliness. It leads to a deep sense of exclusion and resentment.
You're someone no one calls, because you never called, and now it's too late to change.
I don’t want to keep making the choice to lose by default. I don’t want to be the kind of person who lets friendships and obligations quietly vanish. I want to be someone I can rely on.