My dysfunctional relationship with deadlines

Embracing the black and the red

A woman tlacuilo, or painter-scribe (here labeled “painter”), represented in the early colonial Codex Telleriano-Remensis, folio 30r.

I was reading a recent piece by the always-insightful Jeannine Ouellette about how to inspire yourself to write without waiting for the muse (a sentiment I strongly agree with), and she mentioned the magical motivating power of deadlines. 

And I wondered, as I have for the last two decades, why can’t I get that magic to work for me? For other writers, deadlines help to spur creativity by structuring their time and motivating them to get work done. 

But me? I get a deadline and it hunkers like a troll under the bridge of “a later date.” I occasionally glance at it out of the corner of my eye, but I can never look it fully in the face or terror consumes me. 

Douglas Adams once said: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Now that is a writer I can relate to. I can reliably spur myself into creativity a few days before the deadline, so long as it is obvious to any reasonable observer that the work can’t possibly be completed in that amount of time. As soon as the work is impossible, I’m on it, butt in chair, brain whirring with the bright fuel of panic. It would almost be enjoyable, if not for that faint sense of nausea that permeates my every waking hour. Then the deadline whooshes by and it’s off to the races: push everything else to the side, focus on this, who ever heard of eating? 

Then I finish, my mind a rubble in the aftermath of burning passion. Momentarily numb to the danger, I glance at my calendar. Oh shit. Too late, I am witness to my future: a dozen more trolls under a dozen more later dates.

And some of them have gotten frighteningly close while I was flaming through the previous job.

I cannot stand this lifestyle of lurching from crisis to crisis—and my digestive system isn’t too fond of it either—but I have had so much trouble trying to change. The idea of a simple, daily work habit is so appealing on paper, but when I attempt it in real life, I’m either paralyzed by how much work I have to do or bored with the idea of working at all. Of course, no one loves everything about their work, and I certainly have jobs that I’d rather leave to someone else. But neither are they horrifying or dangerous or even particularly onerous. Yet I am capable of putting off an hour’s uninspired work for weeks. When I was younger, I wrote my novels while procrastinating on college assignments. Later, I procrastinated on writing one novel by…writing a different one. Now, my tasks and writing projects seem to have multiplied and I don’t so much procrastinate as stare blankly at the screen while waging an internal war that leaves all factions broken and spiritless. 

And the troll is still there, squatting in its stupid mud, tolling the hours like a plague bell.

The pomodoro method works for me, but it is an odd battle even to convince myself to use it. My resistance to work and my need for it have been at war my entire life. It’s as though I love work but don’t trust it not to beat me up and throw me to the trolls. So I agree to see it and then run away until I’m about to lose it. When it’s really bad, I find myself overwhelmed with exhaustion as soon as I open up my email or a document. I swoon over my keyboard like an old Victorian matron and crawl to the kitchen for more coffee. I’m not willing to give up my career, so the work will get done, but the question of when is a game of roulette, possibly Russian, with my own psyche. 

This is all to say: I have a lot I need to get done over the next few days. My to-do list and calendar notifications are a long block of black and red. Wait—that’s interesting. Those were the colors of the scribes in ancient Mesoamerica. The black and the red, in tlilli in tlapalli in Nahuatl, was a metonymy (of a specific doubled kind called “difrasismo” in the literature) for writing and knowledge. Am I afraid of writing and knowledge? No—how could I be? They’re the only things that have kept me alive. 

In tlilli in tlapalli vs. the troll under the bridge. Get some sunshine on that bad boy and he turns to stone. Up close, you can see that his tongue is a second hand and his eyes chart the hours. I am death, he seems to say, avoid me if you can. But I can’t avoid him any more than I can stop working. It’s the black and the red that I need, this modern tlacuilo struggling to paint the world with words, to step into the next minutes and hours without fear.