I don't know what it is about die minute that just gets your blood pumping and your brain finally working again, all of a sudden, all that fear and adrenaline which you thought you didn't have comes rushing all at once, and it takes over you like a wave. As I stand before you right now (in your imagination, of course), I am currently faced with a lot of deadlines, and they are approaching so fast. But yet, for some reason, I am so calm, almost as though they do not exist. Especially because some of the deadlines require a little bit of creativity on my part, I find myself stalling and pushing them back.
"Surely I'll be able to come up with something before the deadline. I'll start tomorrow."
Then tomorrow turns to the next day, then the next day turns to the next week, and then as time passes things start to get even harder than they were before, and then I realise I am going to be wrecked if I don't get it done, but then I still procrastinate some more. And only when the window is starting to look like it'll close, somehow I go into survival mode and pull together all my resources, pull an all-nighter if I have to, do all that is humanly possible to make it just before the time elapses and the window shuts. 95% of the time, I somehow make it, and the other 5% of the time I end up in max pain, regretting my life choices deeply, but then the stupid thing is that I go ahead and do the same exact thing all over again. It is sincerely very annoying to be honest. Why don't I just learn my lesson? I don't know.
Sometimes I try to trick myself by shifting the deadline forward a little bit, but that only works to an extent. Since I am the one shifting it, my brain is well aware of the entire situation and will do its best to show me that I am not smarter. Other times I find that die-minute helps me save a whole lot of time. All the time I would have spent second guessing myself and being unsure is flung out of the window completely. A task that would normally take 2 hours could take as little as 20-30 minutes.
And then the feeling after I make it just in time. I do not know how to describe the feeling. But it's just some type of intense relief that is so good it feels like a big dopamine hit. But the reverse? When I don't make it, I feel a thousand times worse than I'd feel under normal circumstances. Luckily for me, I make it more often than not. But then, I feel guilty afterwards because making it means a dopamine hit, which is basically rewarding myself for getting it done in the dying minutes, which unconsciously makes me want to do it more, which is exactly what I don't want, and then it creates this whole negative feedback loop, and the cycle continues.
Well, it has been said countless times that the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging you have that problem. And I guess I have done that. Now I am actively working to get everything I need to get done before their deadlines approach. I have crushed 2 just now. The rest will be done tomorrow (LOL), I guess I'll see how it goes.
THANKS FOR PLAYING
Cover image taken by me