When I moved into my apartment two years ago, I had very little furniture. I liked the minimalist approach and proudly lived this way for some time. Friends would come over and awkwardly comment that they had nowhere to sit. Sitting is overrated, I thought, and I did have a kitchen table despite the absence of a couch. I spent the first several months living in less than half of my apartment and occupying the rest just felt like a slow, gradual process.
Eventually I bought a bookshelf because while I was okay not having many places to sit, I felt my books should have a home and that they should be liberated from their cardboard boxes. Getting the shelf was a bit of an ordeal: it was ordered online sight unseen; a neighbor had to receive it; another neighbor helped bring it up the stairs; it was not an appropriate bookshelf but, rather, an industrial piece of equipment that would pass as one. Fine. At least it was a start.
I managed to get the books our of their tattered boxes and up onto the shelf rather quickly. Rather than lining them up properly, though, I simply stacked them in piles. For several months the books sat there, their spines and titles hidden, and every time I needed one, I had to unstack and stack again. It didn’t make any sense. I knew there was something I must be avoiding, that this was my own peculiar form of procrastination — passive aggressive, self-negating.
Then I read an essay on procrastination and it woke something up in me. Now, I was ready for the shift to occur. In fact, it was long overdue. There were other things going on in my life that were spurring me to action, a level of unhappiness that surpassed what I had felt previously. I believe we find things when we’re meant to and this article came when I most needed it. There was a line in it about procrastination giving others the power to control us. The bookshelf suddenly became a symbol of my own consent to giving my power away.