Chapter One

world” on my shoulders. Here’s just a partial list of the sort of judgments I made against myself:

• I felt as if “I didn’t have all my marbles.”
• I not only lacked confidence and respect in myself, but was also convinced that other people “must have” seen the same in me.
• Overly burdened by the matters I had put aside, as well as my inability to deal with them, I sometimes felt as if I were living in a dream world, unattached to reality or other people.
• Procrastination wore me down and felt akin to a bad cold. I often felt tired and sluggish, as though every task took all the energy in the world to complete.
• Many times, when just the thought of dealing with an anxiety-provoking task came to mind, I would automatically associate that thought to a negative scenario. For example, just before sitting down to scour the on-line classified ads and job-hunt, my mind would conjure up the scenario of sitting in the dentist’s chair, or of dealing with an awful drudgery, like housecleaning.
• I had no sense of the word priority: only crises, deadlines, and external demands prompted me into taking action.
• Many, if not most of those crises, were of my own making in the first place. By waiting around for disaster to strike, there’d come a time when I simply had to act, and this gave me the perfect excuse to break through the shame that kept me immobilized. However, so far as I was concerned, I was only dealing with them because once again, the evil forces commonly known as “them” had forced my hand.
• Focusing on only one task at a time was enormous task in and of itself. Whenever I tried to force myself to deal with one task, other tasks I had put off would come flooding back into my mind, as if everything was a priority and needed immediate attention.
• I felt afraid most of the time. Overwhelmed, I avoided feeling fear and anxiety through various means, like television, food, alcohol and recreational drugs. However, by furthering my avoidance, I not only made my original problems worse, but created other problems as well.
• It was as though I was waiting for “David” to do come and do it. Still, who exactly was “David,” and where was he? And why wasn’t “David” taking care of “me”?
• There almost seemed to be two of me…”Irresponsible Me” and the more rare, “Responsible Me.”A poet might have called it: “A life in such perfect conflict.”