What have you been putting off doing? Why?

Do I reiterate the question here as if I’m asking myself or the audience? No, that’s stupid, I’ll just answer the prompt.

This might come across as a confession (and admission) to myself more than anyone else, but I’ve been putting off everything. All of my life has been filled with procrastinating and making excuses. So maybe I’ll just put a couple out there to see who resonates.

Writing. Why? Fear, insecurity, feelings of inadequacy, impostor syndrome, the list goes on and is fairly standard as I understand it from lurking in the various writing communities on social media and discord. I think the most impactful reasons, though, stem more so from pressure and a sort of “performance” anxiety (if you could classify writing as a kind of performative activity.) For several months now I’ve also been trying to remind myself that “people can’t read what you don’t write” and it hasn’t totally helped, but hey I’m here now writing while laying in bed with one eye open when I should be trying to sleep (but I’m also killing time until my nightly routine of playing Wordle as the clock ticks 12:00am.)

Streaming, I keep putting off for similar reasons, but I’ll also add that it just takes a lot of work as well, and I work enough as it is for my day job that I really just want to sit back and enjoy my hobby time with worrying about being entertaining for a live audience. It isn’t like I had a large audience, but from the years of doing it and participating in other streamers communities I found myself enjoying my time with the friends I’ve made along that journey

Homeownership. What a massively adult decision! I’ve been putting this off for so long, but a large part was that I just never earned enough (and still don’t, technically) to afford a mortgage. My roommate has been more than accommodating and cool with me sticking with him for the better part of the last decade, so I’ve kind of just coasted along on that this whole time. I also should be getting my finances in better shape and save more money, which is just another excuse for not trying to go down this path, but then COVID hit and everything changed in the housing market here and made it that much more difficult to accomplish getting a home.

Romance. Well, with my hobbies and lifestyle this one should be self-explanatory but I’ll dive in anyway. Relationships take work and time to build up, but you really need to be meeting people to even get that started in the first place. Which is difficult because I don’t do activities or hobbies that lend themselves to meeting people (except work, but I don’t want to go into that here.)

So, there. I sat down (or laid, rather) and wrote something out. Maybe it’ll help. Maybe it won’t, but I would never know if I didn’t actually do it in the first place, and I really do want to get back in a habit of writing. My blog has been rather lonely and deserves attention, so I’ll try to answer more of these daily writing prompts in the future. (Also, if you’ve made it this far, thank you.)