One of the most terrifying things that has ever happened to me was watching myself decide over and over again—thirty-five days in a row—to not return a movie I had rented. Every day, I saw it sitting there on the arm of my couch. And every day, I thought, I should really do something about that . . . and then I just didn’t.
After a week, I started to worry that it wasn’t going to happen, but I thought, Surely I have more control over my life than this. Surely I wouldn’t allow myself to NEVER return the movie.
But that’s exactly what happened. After thirty-five days, I decided to just never go back to Blockbuster again.
Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don’t want to do. If I lose, I’m one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I’m going to win or lose until the last second.
I’m always surprised when I lose.
But I keep allowing it to happen because, to me, the future doesn’t seem real. It’s just this magical place where I can put my responsibilities so that I don’t have to be scared while hurtling toward failure at eight hundred miles per hour.
Or at least that’s how it used to be. I’ve experienced enough failure at this point to become suspicious of where I’m going and what’s going to happen when I get there. And for the last helpless moments of the journey, I’m fully aware and terrified.
Fortunately, it turns out that being scared of yourself is a somewhat effective motivational technique.
It’s so somewhat effective that I now rely on it almost exclusively when I need to get myself to do something important.
Of course, it isn’t without its flaws—the biggest flaw being that I still have to get very close to failure before I recognize some of the landmarks and panic.
But as long as I figure out what’s going to happen before it actually happens—or hell, even while it’s happening—all the struggling and flailing might propel me away from it in time.
Procrastination has become its own solution—a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success.
A more troubling matter is the day-to-day activities that don’t have massive consequences when I neglect to do them. I haven’t figured out how to solve the problem in a normal way, but I did learn how to make myself feel so ashamed that I’m willing to take action.
Sometimes it doesn’t work for days.
But it always gets to me eventually.
I’ve gotten pretty good at making myself feel ashamed. I can even use shame in a theoretical sense to make myself do the right thing BEFORE I do the wrong thing. This skill could be described as “morality,” but I prefer to call it “How Horrible Can I Be Before I Experience a Prohibitive Amount of Shame?”
Fear and shame are the backbone of my self-control. They are my source of inspiration, my insurance against becoming entirely unacceptable. They help me do the right thing. And I am terrified of what I would be without them. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life.
I’m still hoping that perhaps someday I’ll learn how to use willpower like a real person, but until that very unlikely day, I will confidently battle toward adequacy, wielding my crude skill set of fear and shame.
