Do you have access to my Drafts' list ?!? 🤣 Reading your article is like you reading through me. It's quite distressing but I totally agree with you. The worst part is that most of the times, after a while, the drafts become useless and I just delete them. A great waste of my time and creative process 🤯
We are all very different, yet at the same time we are not that different. The pattern you’re experiencing is something we all share. The expression might look different for you or as Carl Rogers famously said:
I've come to see procrastination less as laziness and more as protection. The blank page can feel strangely dangerous because once an idea leaves our head, it becomes real — imperfect, visible, open to judgment.
That's exactly where the Automatic Brain gets involved. It tells us we're being productive by researching more, refining more, preparing more. But often it's just helping us avoid the vulnerability of actually creating.
I especially liked your point that we're not empty when we feel blocked — we may be too full. The work is not always to find more inspiration, but to release what is already trying to come through.
At some point, the imperfect page has to become safer than the perfect idea we keep protecting.
Thank you, I see myself in this. I call them fragments; ideas and literal bits of writing I never published or shared. I'm trying to overcome that now, pushing out finished pieces, assembling the fragments.
I love this! I'm just getting started on Substack and could completely relate to this. I needed to hear this. The funny thing is I came across your article while I was sitting here procrastinating!
Do you have access to my Drafts' list ?!? 🤣 Reading your article is like you reading through me. It's quite distressing but I totally agree with you. The worst part is that most of the times, after a while, the drafts become useless and I just delete them. A great waste of my time and creative process 🤯
We are all very different, yet at the same time we are not that different. The pattern you’re experiencing is something we all share. The expression might look different for you or as Carl Rogers famously said:
“The personal is the universal.”
This really resonates.
I've come to see procrastination less as laziness and more as protection. The blank page can feel strangely dangerous because once an idea leaves our head, it becomes real — imperfect, visible, open to judgment.
That's exactly where the Automatic Brain gets involved. It tells us we're being productive by researching more, refining more, preparing more. But often it's just helping us avoid the vulnerability of actually creating.
I especially liked your point that we're not empty when we feel blocked — we may be too full. The work is not always to find more inspiration, but to release what is already trying to come through.
At some point, the imperfect page has to become safer than the perfect idea we keep protecting.
Thank you, I see myself in this. I call them fragments; ideas and literal bits of writing I never published or shared. I'm trying to overcome that now, pushing out finished pieces, assembling the fragments.
I love this! I'm just getting started on Substack and could completely relate to this. I needed to hear this. The funny thing is I came across your article while I was sitting here procrastinating!