Yesterday I had a major paper to work on as a final project for my grad school end of term, and I could not pull myself together to work on it. It is due this week, and is a fairly involved project, so I did not actually have the time to waste. But I did anyway.

Days like that are not happy, feel!good days. They are frustrating, and feel like setbacks. It is hard for me to drag through a day like that without just going back to bed.

Then I remembered something my therapist told me during our last session, about how she thought I was living much more in the “present” moment than she had ever seen me do before. I realized that all my procrastination was a distraction from thinking about everything but the present moment – I was absorbed by the idea of what I should be doing, and the price I would pay for not doing it, and what it said about me as a person to not do it, and…

All. That. Crap.

I was not respecting the fact that I am stressed out and working on a labor-intensive project, and needed a break. I was not allowing for my own frailty, or my ability to cope either. Because I can cope, and I do (I have!), and coping is just as productive as anything else I may have planned for the day even if it looks like utter procrastination. Sometimes, it is just as damn necessary as getting something done.

I tried to back off on the judgmental chastisement and focus instead on relaxing and allowing myself some time to regroup. It worked, because over the course of the day I went from despair and self-loathing to a sense of acceptance and newness – I moved from living in my fears to being present in the moment.

At the point where I realized that my headspace had changed perspective, I went for walk, came home and started work on the paper (which, incidentally, the professor pushed the due date back on, so there I was freaking out about nothing anyway). The walk was my way of signifying the change, of breaking the habit of judgmentalism and instead accepting where I was at mentally.

I hate to admit there have been times in my life where I actually pushed myself back into the mindset of despair and self-loathing because it was more comfortable – more familiar – than allowing myself to be present to the moment I was in. That’s why this is Dangerous Living for me: risking myself on changing my own behavior even if it means allowing for uncertainty.

In the end I still did not finish the paper, but I had gone for a walk and made myself a dinner salad and visited with a friend who dropped by, and even wrote a few passages in the dreaded paper itself. I did not get things done, but things were more done than they were when I woke up that morning.

And that right there is what makes everything different (dangerous) in my life: acknowledging and respecting the efforts I make, and appreciating my life as it is, now.

…but yeah, some days are better than others.