dignity does not exist

So I procrastinate a lot. It's a bad habit of mine - almost certainly my worst habit. But strangely enough, I've only really started caring about it and thinking about it a lot this year - calendar year, I mean. Not that I didn't recognize it as a bad thing before, but I didn't see it as very important. Now I do.

Because not only does procrastination hurt me in school (though it doesn't always - a lot of times I can pull it off, and thus procrastinating next time becomes easier to justify), but it means I don't do things I actually want to do - mainly creative things, like writing and drawing.

I want to be a writer. This is my current ambition, though I have a back-up ambition of doing something to do with computers and possibly videogames. The problem is, I don't write nearly enough. Fiction, I mean - though things like this are all too rare as well. And see, the best advice I've seen on writing - it says to write a lot. Except in better language. Here:

Here is what advice I can offer you from the path I have taken: write like a goddamn maniac for somewhere between ten years and the rest of your life. Write what you love, and, more importantly, write what you are ashamed of loving. Get pen names so that you don’t have to be ashamed. Write anonymously so you can stroll away from your failures without regret. Go places no one knows you. Write as catharsis and escape. Write as celebration. Write to fuck the police. Research your butt off. Question everything you think you know, most of it is guaranteed wrong and the rest of it wouldn’t be hurt by double-checking. Talk to people! Read shit. Read about writing. Pretend like you are other people and experiment with styles. Be kind and friendly. Write sweet things and horrible things and scary things and sexy things. Have a lot of projects at once so you never have an excuse to not be writing. Also, read a lot of shit at once so you never have an excuse to not be thinking.

Do all this forever. At some point you will find that you are good at it! You probably won’t be happy. If you were a happy sort of person in the first place you wouldn’t have started writing. You will always feel scared and tired; you will always feel as if you have a hole inside you that everything good drains away through, and nothing truly beautiful or worthy remains. This is why you spent ten years or the rest of your life wrapped up in other people’s problems.

The end.

That was from roachpatrol. And it is great and amazing advice and I first saw it like months ago and I haven't taken it. I have written more than I was writing before, but that doesn't mean much when I was hardly writing at all before and now I'm writing a little bit more than that. I have to write! Writing is my dream and my passion and if I don't throw myself into it I'll be disappointed in myself. I'm disappointed in myself every damn day. Every night when I go to sleep I feel uneasy and disappointed and frustrated and sad. Because I didn't write. More than that - I didn't do anything I consider worth my time. I didn't write, I didn't draw, I didn't read, I didn't think.

So hopefully the Homestuck Shipping Olympics will help motivate me and be helpful. But I can't rely on that alone. I can't rely on anything, any motivation, unless I myself put my willpower into it. Unfortunately, my willpower has never been very reliable. But I have to ignore that, because damn it, I have to write!