Let me be straight with you. I’m screwing up.

It's Thursday afternoon. It's 1.53 p.m. And I'm only now starting to write this essay for you.

If you know me at all, you know that I am a pre-crastinator, that I normally do things well in advance of when they're due. That's not always a good thing, but it's my thing.

But this week, I just haven't gotten around to writing my weekly essay till now.

Normally, I do my Friday writing on Monday morning. I sit down after elevenses, and I write for an hour or so, then the essay is done, ready to be sent out.

But this week, I had to go to a funeral on Monday. I had to do various savory and unsavory things every single lumpy day this week, and here it is Thursday afternoon, and I'm just sitting here writing this excuse for not having done my work till now.

Not that I need to give you an excuse. Because you're probably going to get this essay, whatever it is, at the same time you normally do, 3 o'clock in the morning on Friday.

It's not that I'm up at 3 o'clock in the morning sending it to you. Well, actually, I often am up at 3 o'clock in the morning, but fortunately, the wonders of technology make it possible to send you an essay whenever I choose.

But, anyhoo, tardiness and excuses are not what I wanted to talk about today.

I usually don't wait till the last minute because, being a pre-crastinator, I've established a system for writing so it never gets to be this sort of disaster movie where I'm hanging by my fingers from the edge of a deadline while the time bomb ticks down and I can’t decide which wire to cut.

Just the thought of that kind of failure makes me queasy and want to quit the whole essay-writing shebang. As I've told you before, I do not like getting in trouble, even if it's getting in trouble with nobody but me.

So one of the things that I do is build what I call a buffer, a stockpile of ideas and near-completed essays cramming various folders on my computer. I have lots and lots of folders called “Ready-to-go” or “Rethink these” to “Pretty good ideas” and “Almost…” or “Rough but not ready” to “I’m not sure if this is a thing, but maybe it could be.”

When I sit down to write, I first leaf through these folders, and if I don't have anything fresh or pressing or better to write, I use one of these pre-digested ideas as raw material.

My first instinct today — as I was feeling behind the eight ball, under the gun, in the crosshairs, and the wolf was scratching at the door — was that I should just take some essay I wrote years ago, brush the lint off it, and send that to you.

At the back of my mind, that lazy out what I was thinking about all this morning when I was doing various things like Draw With Me, and having meetings, and eating lunch. ‘Yeah, I'm just going to take the easy way out and recycle something. You'll probably never notice. You may never have read it. You may have read it but have forgotten it. I may have forgotten it too, so why torture myself trying to gin up something new?’

And that is actually what I wanted to talk about today: how I can turn doing the thing I adore into a chore.

It’s a terrible tendency, and I see in other people too — to take something that you’ve made all kinds of sacrifices to be able to do, and then when confronted with the chance to finally do it, it just feels like a burden.

Not always. There are plenty of times I can just delight in sitting down and making art. It is so much fun to put on some music, open my watercolor set, sit down at my desk, and just play and make stuff.

But then there are lots of other times that I'll say to myself, “Boy, you haven't drawn in a while. Why not do it now?”

And then the argument will begin. I’ll say (to myself), “It wasn't that long ago that I did some drawing,” or “I’ve been really busy,” or “I just don't feel inspired,” or “I don't know what to draw” … blah, blah, blech. Rather than just sitting down and doing the thing I love, I end up creating a lot of negative energy instead.

It's all around the word ‘should.’ I should do this, I should do that, I should not do the other.

Should is a difficult word — because should can turn I want into I can't.

I fight with myself if I say, “You know, you should have fun. You should have more joy in your life. You should … be happy.” That phrasing (should) will set me off.

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I do love to write these essays. I love thinking of ideas. I do it all day long. That's why I have all these folders full of half-digested stuff, because I'm writing even when I'm walking my dog, or brushing my teeth, or watching TV, or waking up in the middle of the night.

Ideas just keep flowing.

So I love doing this. And I've decided to not do a lot of other things so that I could do this, but yet sometimes I struggle with it.

When I should do it.

Wired deep inside of me is this idea that if you're having fun, you should feel guilty. Or if you're enjoying yourself, it means that you're going to fail at something else.

I know that there are people out there who just effortlessly have fun and joy, but I'm not one of them. I was raised by various kinds of survivors, people who programmed into me this fear of getting in trouble, and they still haunt the inner corridors of my brain. So when it occurs to me that I can go and do something I really enjoy, they remind me that if that’s why I do it, the bill will eventually come due.

I've mitigated this by saying, okay, well, it's my job. Jobs are fine. You can work hard at your job. But don't work hard at your hobby. Don't work hard at your pastime. Don't work hard playing. Those are a different matter.

But despite all this, despite the fact that I've turned my pleasure into my job so that I'm allowed to enjoy it, the battle inside of me rages on. I’ve developed ways to trick my brain into letting me do these things. One of the tricks is to turn something fun into a habit and say, “I’m going to commit to doing a drawing every day at four o'clock, and I'm going to continue doing this for as many days as I can”. Or I'm going to do a drawing because somebody's paying me to do it. Or I'm going to do a drawing because I read an article that says that having fun and being creative is good for your health.

These are reasonably effective bits of deception. But, boy, I'd like to get beyond that. I'd like to be able to sit down and say, I'm just going to make something just because I want to. Just because that's who I am. I'm a guy who makes stuff…

Whoa, hey, look, I just managed to do it again.

I wrote something. This thing. I enjoyed doing it. And I feel great that I did (finally) do it.

And now I can send it to you. I hope you enjoy reading it, too.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Join me for a series of free events I'm doing on YouTube with my friend, the artist and author Nicki Trakios. Each morning of next week, M-F, at 9 am PT, join us on my YouTube channel. We'll be experimenting and sharing techniques and tools to stretch each other's creativity into new directions.

Can't make it live? — watch the recordings!