I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.
Yep, this is a very, very common reason for procrastinating. It’s also why procrastination, even though it’s often associated with laziness, is a fairly common trait in a lot of people with anxiety and perfectionism issues.
This idea – You’re not lazy, you’re protecting yourself – hit me really hard while reading, of all things, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which turns out to be as much about how brains work and how relationships work as how orgasms work.
In an early part of the book she talks about Fight/Flight/Freeze responses to threats–the example she uses is being attacked by a lion. You fight, if you think you can defeat the lion; you run away, if you think you can escape the lion; and when you think there’s nothing you can do, when you feel the lion’s jaws closing on your neck, you freeze, because dying will hurt less that way. You just stop and go numb and wait for it to be over, because that is the last way to protect any scrap of yourself.
Later in the book, she talks about the brain process that motivates you to pursue incentives, describing it as a little monitor that gauges your progress toward a goal versus the effort you’re expending. If it feels like too little progress is being made you get frustrated, get angry, and, eventually, you… despair. You stop trying.
You go numb and wait for it to be over, because that’s the only way left to protect yourself.
So it occurred to me that these are basically the same thing–when facing a difficult task, where failure feels like a Threat, you can get frustrated and fight it out–INCREASE DOING THE THING until you get where you’re going. Or you can flee–try to solve the problem some other way than straight on, changing your goal, changing your approach, whatever. Fight or flight.
But both of those only apply when you think the problem is solvable, right? If the problem isn’t solvable, then you freeze. You despair.
And if you’re one of those Smart Kids (Smart Girls, especially) who was praised for being smart so that all tasks in the world came to be divided between Ooh This Is Easy and I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DO THAT AND IF I FUCK UP I WILL DIE, then… it’s pretty easy to see how you lose the frustration/anger stage of working toward a goal, because your brain goes straight to freeze/despair every time. Things are easy and routine or they are straight up impossible.
So, you know, any time you manage to pull yourself up and give that lion a smack on the nose, or go stumbling away from it instead of just falling down like a fainting goat as soon as you spot it on the horizon, give yourself a gold star from me. Because this is some deeply wired survival-brain stuff. Even if logically you know that that term paper is not a lion, it really is like that sometimes.
On one hand, Furihata
knows he doesn’t have any reasons to feel insecure. Even though they have a
long distance relationship, he talks to Akashi and texts and emails him almost
every day, and no one could be more attentive or loving than Akashi. Akashi also
makes regular trips to Tokyo when he can, explaining that it is much more
logical for him to make the trip because he has better access to travel.
(Akashi has never flat out said, “Because I’m richer than you and also I have
private jets and chauffeurs,” but it is sometimes heavily implied).
But Furihata feels
it’s important that sometimes he is the one who makes the journey to Kyoto, and
he’d feel better about the whole thing if he didn’t get the impression that
Akashi didn’t quite like it when he was here.
And now, a few of
Akashi’s classmates have spotted him, and they’re talking to him, and Furihata
wouldn’t say he was jealous, exactly, but these girls are all incredibly
pretty and also wearing very fancy clothes with designer handbags and he can’t
but follow a certain train of thought along the lines of, “These girls are all
way out of my league, which is fine because I have a boyfriend, except these
girls all clearly like my boyfriend, and holy crap that probably means my
boyfriend is leagues out of my league.”
Trying to convince
himself that Akashi can’t be out of his league if they are actually dating
doesn’t seem to be working, and he seems to be running in so many circles in
his mind that he’s dizzy and distracted.
So he doesn’t notice
when he accidentally wanders into traffic until the car almost hits him.
*
The honking gives him
enough time to jump out of the way. He falls on his butt and scrapes his palms
and he thinks, “Holy crap I could have died.” He has just enough time to wonder
how many near-death experiences one person is reasonably allowed to have during
high school before they’re officially deemed too stupid to live before Akashi
is there, in front of him, touching him everywhere.
“Furi, Kouki,
are you alright?”
“I’m fine, really,”
Furihata says, laughing slightly. “Gosh, that was dumb.”
“Ooh, you’re
bleeding,” one of the girls’ says sympathetically. “Here, I have a handkerchief—”
“Leave,”
Seijuurou snarls, glowing bright red. “All of you, get out of here.”
The girls abruptly
turn around and leave, in a vaguely zombified manner.
“Seijuurou,” Furihata
says, slightly taken aback. Akashi—both versions of Akashi—is usually very
careful about when he uses Absolute Order.
“Are you sure you are
unharmed?” Seijuurou asks.
“Yes, it was just a
scrape,” Furihata says, showing him his hands. His palms are bleeding,
but the wound is shallow, it’s not anything worse than what he could have
received during basketball practice.
Seijuurou cradles his
hands carefully in his, rubbing his thumb along the uninjured side. “We are
going home,” he announces.
“What? We still have a
movie—”
“We are going back to
Tokyo,” he says more firmly, glowing red again for a brief second. And Furihata
falls silent, because if Akashi is trying to Order him he must be very
rattled. So he lets Akashi wrap an arm around his waist and walks silently
alongside him, very confused, and very concerned.
*
It is only Seijuurou’s
complete control over his own body that keeps him from shaking. He is furious
with himself and how unforgivably stupid he has been. He has been sloppy
and he didn’t think things through, and after all of training from Teiko and
Akashi Masaomi he should have known better.
He has come, for
better or worse, to depend on the Emperor Eye to warn him of danger. Gold had
whole premonitions—he could see a whole mission before it happened and warn of
every potential hazard. Seijuurou had only experienced that sense of clarity
once, when he knew for certain what would happen to Teiko if they all ran away.
But he does see
danger. His foresight has always let him know when a threat to himself or his
Generation was imminent. It had let him down only once and he hadn’t thought
about it (he hadn’t thought about it! Foolish and lazy and
stupid!). When he had been abducted he hadn’t seen it coming and at the time
he’d assumed that was because of something Teiko had done as a precaution—like the
collars they created that inhibited his abilities.
He is not sure he can
ever forgive himself for not making the connection sooner.
Furihata is immune to
his abilities. A trait that Akashi has been very thankful about because it
means he can never accidentally Order Furihata to do something against his
will.
It never occurred to
him that it also meant he will never know if Furihata is in danger.
A/N: OK! So! When I had
this sudden epiphany how I wanted to combine both of these prompts together
(plus some bonus jealous Furihata for the one anon-friend who asked recently) I
was super excited about this but then also realized it was probably better if
it appeared in the long story I have planned but I’d already written more than
half of it and I’m still super excited about it so I’m posting it anyway! But
it might also appear again in that longer story I have planned. Sooo, call it a
snippet into that story that isn’t written yet. Thank you so much,
anon-friends!!
The kicker is, Derek thinks, Dex is nothing like fire.
He’s capped in red, dotted with red like he’s been singed by a thousand bright sparks, but he’s not fire himself. He’s earth, grounded and serious and not given to flight or flame or fancy. Dex gets mad sometimes, but not everyone who gets mad is fire; in Dex’s case he’s an earthquake. A low shudder, a deep rumble, cracks appearing on the surface. If a building should crash to the ground, if an electrical wire should snap and start spraying sparks, those are all side effects. At the core of him, he’s tectonic plates. Low and slowly shifting, every deliberate movement deeply consequential. He’s the earth.
If anyone is fire, it’s Derek himself. He’s made of heat; his attention is constantly jumping; he’s brightness and carefully controlled excitement. He takes in anything, consumes it utterly, makes it part of himself. Burns his signature into it. But Derek has never been able to limit himself to just one element. He’s air, too, and water. He’s ice and metal. But as much as he loves the earth, loves to bury himself in leaves until he can feel the warmth of the soil beneath, he’s never been part of it. He’s never been an anchor.
Dex is. Dex is solid and sure, and, Derek is certain, he holds a core of warmth deep within. So Derek keeps burrowing down, trying to reach it. He wants to find that part of Dex that’s soft and yielding, that makes things grow. Somewhere beneath the surface, beneath hair and skin like a pile of flaming autumn leaves, is the gentle, giving touch of earth. Derek wants to roll around in it forever.
ooh and corsica.hockey is amazing for advanced stats. it has skater, goalie, team, game, and line combo stats which it then lets you filter by like a dozen different things. also their player similarity calculator is a lot of fun!
own the puck’s HERO charts are a great way to compare two players (though they appear to be down at the moment 😦 )
imagine your fave goalie following you around to save you whenever you’re gonna fuck up in life like i can just imagine almost giving a guy my number and lundqvist coming out of nowhere and blocking me and you just hear “sAVE BY LUNDQVIST”
You should write commercials for the NHL.
this is the nicest thing anyone has ever told me
#shows a man getting into his car after work and he looks over and Holtby’s riding shotgun #‘hey weren’t you supposed to pick up milk on your way home today’ #‘oh yeah thanks holtby’ #SAVE BY HOLTBY #a college student’s about to start a movie marathon when theres a knock on the door #they open the door and there’s rask #‘did you do your report that’s due at midnight’ #‘oh shit no thanks man’ #SAVE BY RASK #a woman’s talking to the PTA of her kid’s school and she’s about to volunteer #she looks over and there’s fleury #‘are you sure you want to volunteer for that?’ #‘actually no i really don’t thank you’ #SAVE BY FLEURY (via)
okay but don’t try to tell me that some muggle born kids in America or Canada (or Russia!!!!) won’t have AT LEAST one (1) person with a goalie as their patronus, like i’m calling bullshit if you think that a 6 foot something man decked out in protective gear squatting in front of you and batting dementors away like pucks during warmups isn’t something that has happened in these countries
for that matter what about d-men, what about fiesty players body slamming dementors away to whatever hellscape they came from isn’t totally gonna protect you or at least make the situation less scary
but it’s not just obscure, generic “goalies” or “d-men” no it’s legitimately real people probably based on the person’s favorite team or the team they have good memories with so please just imagine being in that situation and ur friend’s patronus is Marc-Andre Fleury and yours is Henrik Lundqvist and your sisters is Kris Letang but your neighbors is Jordie Benn and I am just
just moving along like everyone else 