I’ve been avoiding writing. Sort of.

How the problem I thought I had wasn’t what I’d been calling it—and why that matters.

It’s the middle of the night and I’m returning from a dance event that is 170 miles away. I’ve been driving for hours. I’m desperate to get home, get into bed, and get some much needed sleep. Or I’ve popped to the supermarket to buy food for dinner. I’ve got hardly any time because I need to prep, cook, eat and be out of the house in less time than I actually have available to complete all those tasks. Or it’s just a regular trip in the car and returning home is the culmination of the journey because home is where both myself and my car live.

For some reason, regardless of the circumstance, the length of the drive, the time of day, what preceded the drive, what needs to come afterwards, any urgency (or not), when I pull up at home I know I should go inside the house but something happens in my brain that stops me from turning off the car, taking the keys out of the ignition, and then leaving the car. Step one and step two are relatively straightforward — I’m pretty good at turning off the car and preparing to leave it. Because the delay in getting out is not because I want to keep driving. It’s not even that I don’t want to go in the house. It’s more that I know what I need to do but my brain and body are resisting doing it. Writing this article has been the same.

I set up my Substack account months ago, updated my profile weeks ago, and then set up a publication days ago... flurries of activity followed by an absence of the one thing that all those tasks were actually in service of: writing. I feel like I’ve been doing the Substack equivalent of sitting in the car outside my house when I know the purpose of the drive was to get home.

I actually enjoy writing once I do it, so there’s an element of this situation that’s puzzled me. But then again, I have form for delaying tasks, or deferring getting started. Because it’s not just getting out of the car or writing where this pattern shows up. I find it hard to get out of bed even when I know I need to be up and getting ready; I can talk myself out of having a shower and then enjoy it so much once I’m in there that I don’t want to get out; I get my suitcase out well ahead of time, write an extremely detailed packing list but pack at the very last minute; I do immense amounts of research before buying an item I’m really excited to purchase, but it will often sit in my basket — sometimes indefinitely — before I actually checkout.

This isn’t a new thing for me either... I can’t blame being busy with work, or having three children, or engaging in really involved hobbies, even though all of those things are true. Since I was a child I’ve struggled with getting things done. I was often told to go and tidy my room but hours later it looked worse than before I started. My mum would find me on the floor counting badges I’d collected, or folding shiny purple tin foil I’d saved from Cadbury chocolate bar wrappers, or reading one of the many books I seemed to favour instead of doing whatever it was I was meant to be doing. At school I would often complete homework in the corridor before the class started, or surreptitiously try to finish it in the lesson. I have spent a lifetime being ‘just about on time’ because I’ve been convinced that I can absolutely get that task finished before setting off.

During the last year of high school, my form tutor told me I was a procrastinator. It seemed to explain my habits of behaviour well and there were too many instances of me delaying tasks and putting off getting started for me to reject the label. So, over the years I’ve tried to follow the advice for procrastinators... ‘just get started’, ‘break down tasks and start small’, ‘write things down and commit to them’, ‘reward yourself for completing activities’. And I can absolutely see how these advice snippets are useful... unfortunately, they’ve never quite worked for me. Nevertheless, I’ve often thought I am just a particularly stubborn procrastinator and the solution is to work harder on tactics and overcome the desire to delay. Sometimes that works — for all of a couple of weeks. I’ve also done a lot of work on the emotional and psychological aspects associated with procrastination. Despite the fact that the reasons provided haven’t always felt like they fit how I actually feel, I assumed that there was a deeper anxiety that my conscious mind didn’t necessarily have access to.

So when I started putting off writing my first Substack article, I thought it was just another expression of my tendency to procrastinate. And, for sure, I think there’s probably an element of anxiety that has contributed to the delay... but it hasn’t felt like the whole story. And then the other day I pulled up outside my house and had the familiar feeling of wanting to be inside my home and not wanting to get out of the car all at the same time, and I realised that that feeling —of wanting the next thing but not feeling finished with the current thing— was much closer to how I’d been feeling when I’d been considering starting to write; much more so than an anxiety to get started. Because starting to write this article means stopping writing my website copy; it means putting down the business development for a bit and switching to a different way of thinking and writing. This insight got me thinking: maybe the reason being a ‘procrastinator’ has felt accurate, but only partially so, is because it’s not the whole story in those other situations either.