Who Asked? // Why am I unmotivated?

I’ve been staring at a pale blue Hydroflask that’s been sitting on my desk, unwashed, for three weeks. 

At first I “just didn’t have the time,” but before long, I had convinced myself that the entire ordeal of cleaning the water bottle was too much effort. Instead, I bravely went dehydrated or bought disposable bottles or refilled soda cans and took them with me to class. 

The water bottle isn’t the only task in my life that I simply can’t find the energy to complete. Or, at the very least, complete enthusiastically. I drag myself to lecture just to play slither.io the entire time. I push off homework assignments until literally the last minute, and I dodge unpacking a bag full of clothes from home. Shoes are left in my living room, spinach goes bad in my fridge and my wastebasket starts to overflow. This summer I had bright visions of productivity. I was going to stay on top of classes, look for a job — hell, I was even going to sign up for a workout class. I have the yoga mat and eight-pound weights in my room to prove it. But instead, I am dragging myself out of bed 10 minutes before class starts and scrolling through Instagram reels for hours, draped over my couch like a rich lady in an old painting. Unlike the rich lady, however, I cannot afford endless hours of leisure. 

So what the hell happened? But, more importantly, why does this always happen? These patterns are not new for me. In eighth grade, my math teacher called me “Ari-zone-out” because I could never pay attention. Throughout all of high school, I’d push off homework assignments till 2 a.m. The cleanliness, or lack thereof, of my bedroom at home has been the bane of my mother’s existence for many moons. 

But I wasn’t like this when I was really little. When I was in kindergarten, I told everyone I was  looking forward to having homework, and when I was in second grade, I was the first in my class to be tested for the gifted program, which I then participated in for the rest of my pre-college years. I didn’t have to be organized, because I could read a book under my desk all of class and still ace the test. 

So perhaps this is the problem — I was too good at everything when I was young, so I never had to develop critical skills. The classic gifted kid burnout. Little me would’ve practically passed out at some of the grades I got in senior year math class. But while I do think this contributed to my lack of fine-tuned technique, it seems far too easy a solution for such a permeating problem. 

What about the damn phones? Isn’t that what I’m always hearing causes laziness? Have we become too distracted, too dopamine-obsessed? While it’s true that I certainly have a problem with looking at my phone, I think we tend to mistake causation and correlation. I’m not behind on homework because I look at my phone too much, per se. Rather, I look at my phone more when I feel particularly overwhelmed by tasks or afraid to start something. 

Here we come closer to what I believe is the root of the problem — the fear and panic around tasks or being behind. We live in a culture that is so obsessed with comparison, stacking ourselves up against everyone from friends to strangers on the internet. It becomes suffocating.

But I have not failed a class. I have not become lost in a horde of clothes in my room. My muscles have not atrophied to the point of uselessness. I still do my homework, I still clean up and I still exercise — perhaps just not to the extent of the perfect standards I set for myself. 

This then becomes a vicious cycle. Procrastination is not a sign of laziness, but a sign of fear of failure. I am not pushing off scheduling an internship consultation because I’m lazy, but because it’ll make me think about all the things I haven’t done yet or all the ways my classmates are pulling ahead. I am not avoiding writing this blog until the day it is due because I don’t care about my blog, but because deep down I feared it would be boring or useless or whatever else prevented me from sitting down and opening my computer.
Plus, it’s not like I’m not busy. I have a life, I have balance, I have friends and clubs and a million fun little things that I will not skip for the sake of forcing myself to get a homework assignment done early. It’s so easy to feel like everyone else has it all, like every other student is cranking out essays and studying for twelve hours straight, acing every exam. Suddenly, I am the only girl in the world to push off laundry day until there is only one pair of underwear in my drawer. Suddenly, I am the only person turning in her project 10 minutes before 11:59 p.m. 

I wonder how much calmer I’d feel if I just started being kinder to myself. If I accepted that, in all likelihood, I will probably do the homework the day it is due, and I will do absolutely fine on it. If I could forgive myself for being a human person who sometimes forgets things or leaves her shoes in the living room, I would not be so torn apart by the anxiety or malaise that prevents me from getting tasks done in the first place. 

We find ourselves in a vicious cycle where the stress of falling behind or not measuring up to our peers makes us fall behind further. It is so much more difficult to be functional when my own brain is busy yelling at itself. I don’t need the Pomodoro method and I don’t need a little pink planner — I need to accept that I am a girl with 45 tabs open right now and five different cups from the past week in her kitchen and there is nothing inherently, deeply wrong with that. I need to be okay with being who I am and functioning the way I function, and having faith that I will not let myself down in the end. 

And I need to go clean that damn Hydroflask.