Shaking Off the Dust

I have a few friends I would love to cut off. They’re kind of assholes. They overstayed their welcome, sucked dry my self-esteem and get in the way of doing important stuff. Like, updating this blog.

One of them has been around too long. Procrastination. This charming lazy prick has a way of making everything fun, except what really needs to be done. We’ve been friends since puberty, avoiding responsibility, making sure that panic reaches its absolute maximum before lighting a fire under my ass to meet deadlines. Sure, if suddenly cleaning becomes far more entertaining than say, writing, or working, that should be a clear sign that Procrastination should not be around any longer. But, like any good procrastinator, I postponed ending my relationship with Procrastination. I guess there were too many episodes of Breaking Bad to get through before doing that. Procrastination and I have been together too long for me remember why we hooked up in the first place. It’s more of a force of habit than a real commitment. Even so, it doesn’t seem to want to get going and that interrupts the fluidity of my life, chopping it up and inserting too many moments of:

1)    Googling “Jessica Biel’s workout routine”

2)    Singing Les Miserables full soundtrack until I am certain I can audition for the part of Eponine

3)    Youtube. So much Youtube

4)   Writing down To-do lists I never complete

5)    Feeling bad for never completing the To-do lists

6)    Contemplating why I’ll never be as cool as Freddie Mercury

7)    You get it.

The other good-for-nothing obnoxious motherfucker is Fear. It’s not that he is around every now and then to serve as a motivation to do better, to really challenge myself. It’s that he is the loudest, jittery, repetitive dude I’ve ever met. He is also a master at the what ifs. 

Are you sure you want to do that? Once you choose, you can’t go back, you know? What if you fail? What if you embarrass yourself? What if you really don’t know what you are doing? What if you can’t take it back? What if you never become what you want to become?

Over, and over and over again. And it doesn’t get old for him. He loves it when I make the safe choices, the ones that won’t hurt me but won’t be memorable either. Fear’s kind of a drag.

The cousin of Fear is Insecurity. It follows it around like a puppy, a puppy that whimpers all the time and you’d seriously consider kicking. Not only does it echo Fear’s incessant questions, but it makes me feel like I walk around giants, giants that at any moment can flatten me with a single move. Insecurity makes you live inside a box you find uncomfortable at first but then you can’t imagine being able to stretch your arms and legs like you used to. You just don’t have that flexibility anymore. Insecurity is more than a downer. It makes me forget I used to be great and makes me believe I was always small.

Nobody wants these three fuckers around. But once you let them spend a few minutes, it’s hard to get them to leave. They feign friendship by pretending to keep you safe and away from all bad choices. But they also keep you away from any choice, any movement. Breaking up with them is hard and whenever I manage to, we always end up getting back together, like a couple that doesn’t want to accept its end because it doesn’t know anything else. It’s sad. 

The truth is this is just my lame way of shaking off the dust. Fear yells every time I get the fire to write here again, saying these things have an expiration date and my blog is way past the sour milk stage. It’s cheese.

I don’t want to be cheese. I want it to be fresh and funny again (if it ever was). That was Insecurity again. I don’t want to open up a million tabs in my browser to avoid the one thing I want to do. Write. I don’t want to be afraid of my past failures of not following through or becoming a giant excuse maker (I’m too good at that now).

I want for my words to be louder than Fear, Procrastination and Insecurity, and if they’re not, I want to shut them up by singing very loudly “Don’t Stop me Now” or “Get Off of my Cloud”. Freddie and Mick won’t be proud of my singing, but I’m sure it will do the trick.

Maybe this is just repetitive now and it has lost its truthfulness, like a boyfriend that keeps promising to change or another cell phone company promising you the best service out there.

The truth is I’m going to give this one more shot. Who can it hurt, except my pride, dreams and basically the last smidgen of optimism that I possess? Fuck it. Let’s just do this.

The three “friends” probably will never go away completely. But I changed the locks and they won’t come in for a while.

My metaphors are a little rusty. It will get better.