RIght now, I'm in physical therapy and active rehabilitation after a big abdominal surgery at the end of 2020. As you might expect, I am very relaxed and chill about it - I definitely don't throw tantrums about how "I used to be able to do this" and "why can't I just think about doing it and it happens" and "THIS IS ALL VERY FRUSTRATING."
It boils down to this gap - there's the fact that I intellectually understand what I need to do, I've researched it, I can explain it, and probably teach it, and then the equally true fact that I cannot do it yet, in my embodied state.
And while most (I hope!) of you are not recovering from major surgery, I think there's something really powerful about the gap between intellectually wrapping your mind around something, and actually doing it. Just a few examples I've heard from the last few weeks:
Knowing that you want to break your project into smaller steps to make it feel more manageable, and being too overwhelmed to even look at it
Intellectually understanding that you should start working on the abstract for the conference due in three weeks, but feeling no urgency about it and putting it off way until it's on fire
Knowing that you are doing your best in the middle of a difficult degree and hugely difficult circumstances, but still fighting with the feeling that you could and should be doing more
Reading all the blogs and books and coaching advice pieces about how to do something, and still needing practice to get it right (and hating that)
The gap looks really different in all kinds of people and situations, but the emotions of frustration, shame, anger, guilt, and avoidance all hang around this particular formation.
And even worse, it plays into one of the sneakiest stories hanging around the academia / intellectual product development / "intelligent/gifted/advanced/good at school" campfire:
You could be anything if you just pushed yourself. You'll never reach your potential if you don't apply yourself. If you just worked harder / started earlier / used these skills / did what I did, you'd finally meet the standards. You have all this potential and you refuse to use it.
I promise you that if you intellectually understanding how to space out a project like a dissertation over a few semesters was all it took for a person to be able to do that, no one would need me or this community or therapists or skills coaches or librarians or books or blogs about it. My physical therapist asked me why I expected to be able to have full use of my abdominal muscles, recently cut open in 5 different locations, and I explained that I researched how the muscle binds together and which muscles were being recruited to take over and how different exercises redistribute that load. She laughed at me (kindly) and said "you can't think your ab wall back together."
It's easy to see why she felt that was silly - of course I can't think at my abs and make them work! But it's much, much more difficult to wrap one's brain around the idea that you also can't think your way out of a lot of challenges like focus, scheduling, procrastination, or planning. We can really believe that we can just, focus or have a new schedule or plan better or start things earlier by thinking about it! But, like our abdominal muscles operate in the complex system of the body, a much more complex soup of environment and emotion and context and support is actually surrounding, feeding, and supporting a problem like procrastination.
And, like my physical therapy is going to be tailored to my situation, what solutions you may need for yours are also individual. But the first step, if you can take a few moments this week, is to look at all the places where you are punishing yourself for a natural, important, evolutionarily crucial, situationally complex, identity and context dependent gap exists between what you may know, and what you may do. Where are you yelling at your metaphorical abs to fix themselves? How can you reframe that into something a little kinder to your abs?