Listen to the little voice

Sign­ing up for the lat­est swap on one of my Yahoo! groups was a mis­take, I fig­ured, but I went ahead and did it any­way.? I was right.? It was a round-robin, on a strict dead­line, and I do not do ter­ri­bly well with strict dead­lines at the best of times. Right now, with my Muse on hia­tus, a cre­ative round-robin was doomed to not go well and it didn’t. No cre­ativ­ity, no moti­va­tion, pro­cras­ti­na­tion on the mail­ings (I really do loathe going to the post office), and no real expla­na­tion for any of it — just men­tal and psy­cho­log­i­cal inabil­ity to do any­thing, or to even talk about it to any­one. So I was dropped from the swap, got my book mailed back to me, and finally got the book I still had into the mail (with­out any con­tri­bu­tion from me, sadly).

Nat­u­rally I feel like a total shit, to the point where I have avoided emails and group digests because they just wors­ened the spi­ral. I really need to not par­tic­i­pate in swaps and round-robins until I can get my pro­cras­ti­na­tion and avoid­ance behav­iors straight­ened out.? Next time I’ll? lis­ten to the lit­tle voice in my head that says, “yes, it sounds cool, but remem­ber, you usu­ally man­age to screw these things up despite your best inten­tions,” and stay out so I don’t piss peo­ple off. Just another les­son I’m kind of slow learn­ing, eh?