How I Stopped Procrastinating
By MERRILL MARKOE
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I learned something about a year ago that I wish I’d learned much sooner. And it happened only after I woke up one morning and couldn’t walk. An X-ray revealed that my hip cartilage had made a unilateral decision to jump ship. I liked my hip cartilage. I thought we’d be together forever.
Of course, as often happens with a bad divorce, problems had been brewing for years. I’d been ignoring increasingly strong leg pains because I thought their origin might be emotional. In my early 20s I’d had asthma so intense that I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs, only to have all the symptoms disappear entirely at the age of 26 after breaking up with a boyfriend. The finer points of this lesson were not lost on me.
After all, I was raised in a family with a rich history of psychosomatic ailments. When the leg pains started, I eschewed the medical establishment in favor of talking to a shrink and also consulting a cryptic, sometimes baffling homeopathic “doctor” who favored meridian readings and dietary advice. He said my hips were fine, told me to eat more red meat and avoid summer fruits. Plums, peaches and melons were like eating poison, he explained solemnly. Obediently, I eliminated them from my shopping list. He sent me home with a jar of topical hormone cream to add to the 40-some-odd bottles of essential vitamins, minerals and food supplements he’d sold me over the years.
Turned out I had to take time out from immortality to get both of my hips replaced. I was hardly a font of good cheer during the six-week wait for surgery, when I couldn’t make the short trek from my bedroom to my bathroom without a walker. So there I was: crippled and forced to rethink my daily schedule. No more going to the gym or walking the dogs. My usual morning ritual of coffee and the newspaper became physically impossible since I couldn’t walk out to the front yard to retrieve The New York Times. Now I suddenly couldn’t even carry that cup of coffee from the kitchen to the office because I had no hand free during transit.
Things seemed pretty bleak until I accidentally stumbled upon something astonishing: I learned how not to hate writing. In this new and more difficult morning paradigm, I found myself wide-awake at 6 a.m. with no paper, no coffee and no scheduled distractions. I am unable to tolerate anchor people smiling and talking at the same time, so morning television was out. I was left so desperate for an activity that I decided to pursue a little writing.
I had a vague idea for a play that I had tried to begin many times at 3 in the afternoon. Each time my efforts were thwarted by the tyrannical voices in my head, which grew louder as the hour grew later, berating me for not taking care of bills, cleaning, shopping, grooming, pet care, more bills, more grooming. And if I got caught up on those things, the voices would quickly remind me that I was too ill informed to begin writing even a personal anecdote without undertaking years of painstaking research. A constant feeding of this negativity cyclone would put me in such a state of anxiety that I’d start reflexively checking Internet headlines in search of an environmental catastrophe or a massacre of some kind to help me refocus my anguish.
Of course, along the way, whenever I encountered a slide show titled “Eight Diet Foods That Pack on the Pounds” or “Celebrity Fashion Fails,” I’d have to stop and investigate because hey, it might be information I’d need in some unforeseeable future where I had become, for some reason, a fat celebrity. And before I knew it: uh-oh. Sunset: time for cocktails and falling asleep. Years of behaving like this convinced me that I’d do anything in my power to avoid writing.
And I say this as someone who has earned a living as a writer for 25 years and used to imagine punching myself in the face, then wrestling myself into a chair before I agreed to start working. I recited the rich literary tradition of legendary literary figures who hated to write. One of my heroes, Dorothy Parker, proudly said: “I hate writing. I love having written.” As I understood it, this was a problem that came with the territory.
AND if that wasn’t evidence enough, there was also all that biological information about the two hemispheres of the brain to prove there could be no cure. Sure, the whole brain participated in most brain function, but art and music were known to be anchored mostly on the right, where they happily partied with “euphoria” and “intuitive flow.”
When I used to paint, I was always impressed by how I would be transported to some floaty, nirvana-like state, only to wonder six hours later where all the time had gone. Not so with writing, which takes place in the left brain, where it’s stuck in an airless waiting room suffocating with all the other poorly dressed, most anal-retentive and under-loved super powers we rely on for most of life’s homework: organizing, structuring, analysis, logic, math, science.
But back to my revelation: When I tried writing at 6 a.m., to my complete surprise I effortlessly wrote 15 pages that first day. The same thing happened when I did it the next day and the day after that. And so it came to pass that in the six weeks before my surgery and in the weeks that followed, I actually enjoyed writing a first draft of my play.
Ellen van Engelen
Here’s what I learned: First thing in the morning, before I have drowned myself in coffee, while I still have that sleepy brain I used to believe was useless — that is the best brain for creative writing. Words come pouring out easily while my head still feels as if it is full of ground fog, wrapped in flannel and gauze, and surrounded by a hive of humming, velvety sleep bees.
And I have a theory about why. Although I am not really known for my scrupulous neurological research and have only personal experience to back me up, what I believe may be happening is that before you are fully awake, your right brain continues to dominate for a while, allowing you access to the pleasant sensation of right brain creativity. Or maybe it’s because during the phase of sleep known as REM the brain becomes more active while at the same time the muscles of the body become more relaxed. And since tests have shown that REM periods become more prolonged as we progress toward waking, maybe a bit of the old “active mind/relaxed body” afterglow lingers on in a helpful way. (Note to Nobel Committee: I can be contacted through my website. I’m also on Twitter.)
Conversely, the relentlessly negative voice that comes from your critical parent seems to be a left brain resident and doesn’t like to wake up too early. (And by the way, there is no faster way to bring that demonic harpy voice to consciousness than restless Internet activity. Once you start randomly interacting with anything on the Internet, the delightful relaxation of the right brain has better taste than to stick around. Soon you will have no one but yourself to blame for the large amount of time you spend contemplating Jennifer Aniston’s favorite summer outfits.)
I’m happy to report that these days I can walk just fine again. But having learned this lesson, I now get up in the morning and immediately start writing. I recommend using a pen as often as possible because it seems to maintain the right brain connection better. I am only trying to help you start the writing process. I can’t guarantee your ideas will be good or reduce the need for endless rewrites. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m at the end of my four hours. I’m going back to sleep.
Merrill Markoe is a humorist and the author of nine books.
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