Take me to travel town

held together (sometimes barely)

1. I have been under deadline, for a little piece I am doing for a BBC radio show called Short Cuts, which is a good thing, to have work, but also a stressful thing, because I am trying to make something new i haven’t made before, and all my worst tendencies of perfectionism and fear have been running defense like a sports analogy about good defense that I’m not equipped to make.

2. Of my favorite self-sabotaging procrastination techniques is being on my phone, in particular playing a dumb game called travel town that I am unfortunately committed to. It’s a merge game, meaning you merge identical items to create new items, eventually to fulfill orders and win coins. “I’ve got 45 thunder bolts and I need to produce a broken amphora and two cement mixers so I can upgrade my boat,” are things that I saw aloud to my partner so I am aware of the absurdity of my fixation. Nevertheless, the game gives me the satisfaction of completing things, when I am avoiding the thing that I’m supposed to be completing.

   According to my iphone, my screentime is up 14% last week.

3. Another technique of my avoidant brain is loading on guilt and shame, especially from past situations still healing and are completely unrelated to task at hand. That’s been fun.*

4. I’ve coped by feeling the fear and doing it anyway. And crying. And googling about hormones. And fantasizing about running away. And making cookies that turned out bad, but still gave me that satisfactory feeling of making something to completion.

*So fun it lead to a bad high, which led me to take a break from my glorious green for a while. It’s been 4 days. Clap for me.