gifted student™ brains are about as functional as horses when you get right down to it
which sounds like a shit post but consider: horses? hypothetically MADE for running. look at this magnificent muscle beasts. look at those legs. they must be so good at running, right? wrong. horses are fragile as fuck. horses break their gotdamn legs so so easily, and if they break their legs you just have to fucking shoot them. if they run, the thing they are MADE FOR, too fast their lungs will start bleeding. I just googled horses to see if I was missing anything and apparently if they lie down for a day their organs start collapsing or something so they can’t rest from their One Horse Purpose even when they’re hurt. they’re made to do one thing but they can only do it under Very Specific Conditions and if a single thing changes they just die.
which, you know. gifted students™ get applauded for being naturally smart when we’re five or whatever and then develop a terrible inflated sense of self that makes us highly averse to anything we’re not naturally good at, because it challenges our fragile childbrain egos and if we wait too long we’ll develop mental fences around entire subjects and skillsets (mine are math and studying) because we think we’re Bad at them, when in reality we just need to practice but are frustrated by that because it’s harder than being ~naturally talented~ was. we get applauded for doing One Thing but the second we run into slightly different things that our brains don’t comprehend as readily? it’s a Bad Time. I still have so much anxiety over things I don’t feel Naturally Talented at that I’ve been sitting here writing this post for like 10 minutes rather than read the feedback on my religion paper. I got a 100% on it, but I’m still That Scared of anything other than straight heaps of praise because that’s what my childbrain was acclimated to. just send me to the glue factory already.
Its important to note that a lot of horse problems are because of how they are exploited by people, pushed too hard and made beasts of burden that they were never meant to be. I think this strengthens the analogy
I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.
Yep, this is a very, very common reason for procrastinating. It’s also why procrastination, even though it’s often associated with laziness, is a fairly common trait in a lot of people with anxiety and perfectionism issues.
This idea – You’re not lazy, you’re protecting yourself – hit me really hard while reading, of all things, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which turns out to be as much about how brains work and how relationships work as how orgasms work.
In an early part of the book she talks about Fight/Flight/Freeze responses to threats–the example she uses is being attacked by a lion. You fight, if you think you can defeat the lion; you run away, if you think you can escape the lion; and when you think there’s nothing you can do, when you feel the lion’s jaws closing on your neck, you freeze, because dying will hurt less that way. You just stop and go numb and wait for it to be over, because that is the last way to protect any scrap of yourself.
Later in the book, she talks about the brain process that motivates you to pursue incentives, describing it as a little monitor that gauges your progress toward a goal versus the effort you’re expending. If it feels like too little progress is being made you get frustrated, get angry, and, eventually, you… despair. You stop trying.
You go numb and wait for it to be over, because that’s the only way left to protect yourself.
So it occurred to me that these are basically the same thing–when facing a difficult task, where failure feels like a Threat, you can get frustrated and fight it out–INCREASE DOING THE THING until you get where you’re going. Or you can flee–try to solve the problem some other way than straight on, changing your goal, changing your approach, whatever. Fight or flight.
But both of those only apply when you think the problem is solvable, right? If the problem isn’t solvable, then you freeze. You despair.
And if you’re one of those Smart Kids (Smart Girls, especially) who was praised for being smart so that all tasks in the world came to be divided between Ooh This Is Easy and I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DO THAT AND IF I FUCK UP I WILL DIE, then… it’s pretty easy to see how you lose the frustration/anger stage of working toward a goal, because your brain goes straight to freeze/despair every time. Things are easy and routine or they are straight up impossible.
So, you know, any time you manage to pull yourself up and give that lion a smack on the nose, or go stumbling away from it instead of just falling down like a fainting goat as soon as you spot it on the horizon, give yourself a gold star from me. Because this is some deeply wired survival-brain stuff. Even if logically you know that that term paper is not a lion, it really is like that sometimes.
Yes! We actually had a perfectionism group in treatment and one of the things they taught us was how perfectionism can actually lead to avoiding stuff & doing less. It’s definitely important to understand this.
One long term strategy I’ve heard is to promise yourself you’ll only work for a smallish period of time (at a date before it’s last min of course). Do you work for that time, and then you congratulate yourself for what you accomplished even if it’s not as much as you wanted, and then no matter what you actually stop. Your brain realizes that doing work can actually be a manageable experience & it starts breaking the association between doing work and stress/sadness/guilt etc. *Lowering* your standards & working before it gets super bad can help with this
me as a writer: obsessed with being original, constantly worried that ill copy another artist by accident, i can’t use that phrase i saw someone use it on may 12th, 2014 and
me as a reader: happily reads 2349460283 different versions of the exact same plot
Question of Smoke 