CiA 3, or “These Are My 20 Minutes”
I’m setting the timer on my phone for 20 minutes. And… go.
You see, I agonize over words. My papers typically make excellent grades because I’ll rewrite the same sentences over and over again until it says exactly what I want to say in exactly the right words. (For instance, that last sentence originally read “I typically make excellent grades on papers in school because I’ll rewrite the same sentences three or four times…”)
In school, it’s actually pretty nice to be as particular as I am about my writing. It gives me good grades, which will be important to me until sometime in May of next year. However, spending three or four hours working on a single piece of short prose such as this or this is simply not conducive to blogging, especially on a college schedule.
But there’s another side to this.
I have ADHD-PI (I’ve linked this elsewhere on my blog. You should read everything I’ve written and find that link if you want further info. :p), which is more commonly known as ADD. My mind wanders constantly, making it difficult to remain attentive to a particular task for any length of time. Combine this with the meticulous writer in me who wants every word to read exactly as it should, and dang. I’ll sit down to write and immediately I’m overcome with the realization that this will be an hours-long task, during which I’ll succumb to intense anxiety, fight through it, create something worthwhile that might win an essay contest but that few people will actually read in its entirety in this context, and then go to bed three hours later than I should.
I guess that’s why I’ve had this blog since early December and only posted 3 times.
5:45 left
Here are my options, as outlined in an anxiety-ridden conversation about this with my girlfriend a few hours ago:
1. Give up blogging.
But I only just started! It’s way too soon for that.
2. Figure out a way to write for a blog, not for a professor.
Oooh. I guess that means I don’t need to agonize over every word, doesn’t it?
But how can I train myself not to kill myself with meticulousness?
And that’s where this post comes in. I set a timer for 20 minutes when I started writing, and made myself swear to publish whatever I have when the timer goes off; I just passed the three-minutes-remaining mark. In order not to humiliate myself with a grossly incomplete post, then, I forced myself not to worry about every single word. (It’s fun to write while the process of transformation is actually happening!)
So this is one of my 101 goals: write a 20-minute post at least once a week for the next 1001 days. God help me.
1:13 left, and I’m done.
A Heavy Word 