There’s a moment, a terrible, magical, cortisol-soaked moment, when a task finally becomes real for me. It’s not when I write it down. It’s not when I plan it, schedule it, color-code it, or build a cute little spread for it in my Traveler’s Notebook. It’s not even when I say out loud, “I need to get this done.”
No.
The moment a task becomes real is when the deadline is close enough that I can smell the panic.
My brain does not respect “in advance.” It does not acknowledge “plenty of time.” It does not comprehend “work ahead to make things easier later.” That language might as well be written in cuneiform. My brain needs urgency like it needs oxygen. If the consequence isn’t looming, the task might as well be fictional.
I can know something is important. I can want to do it. I can plan for it. And yet, the moment I sit down, my brain immediately suggests something absurdly irrelevant. Clean my desk. Reorganize my pens. Start a new system. Rearrange the apps on my phone. Resort the shit on my over-desk shelves. Anything but the one thing I actually need to do.
But the second the deadline becomes hot — the second procrastination morphs into genuine risk — suddenly I’m alive. I’m sharp. I’m focused like some feral academic preparing for battle. There is something in my neurospicy DNA that clicks during urgency, like a built-in turbo mode, except it only activates when everything is on fire.
The cruel part is that this isn’t a moral failing. It’s wiring. It’s the fact that my brain doesn’t generate dopamine for something until the stakes are high enough to trigger the “oh shit” response. Calm tasks don’t register. Non-urgent tasks drift through my mind like fog. But an urgent task? Suddenly I’m sprinting through my to-do list like kid trying to avoid nap time.
And of course, the outside world does not understand this at all. They think urgency means poor planning or carelessness. They think we wait “too long.” They think it’s a choice. But what they don’t realize is that I don’t feel the importance of something until the pressure hits. Not emotionally. Not mentally. Not somatically. My brain needs consequences to wake up.
The guilt is real, though. The shame spiral is vicious. Because I want to be the kind of person who handles things early, who strolls into deadlines well-rested and calm, who doesn’t ride the adrenaline wave like it’s a self-destructive hobby. I want to feel tasks when they’re small, gentle, manageable. But my mind treats “early” like “optional” and “urgent” like “life or death.”
It’s not healthy. It’s not ideal. It’s not sustainable. But it is reality.
There’s also a darker undercurrent here. Urgency feels familiar. When you grow up in chaos, when every decision feels like it might tip the world sideways, when your nervous system learns to stay braced for the next impact… calm doesn’t always feel safe. Urgency does. Urgency feels like home. Urgency feels like the environment you were trained in.
Tasks only feel real when they match the energy my body was taught to respond to.
Which is heartbreaking, honestly. Because it means sometimes I’m not procrastinating — I’m waiting to feel the anchor drop. I’m waiting for the emotional charge that says, “Now. Now it matters.” And I hate that. I hate that part of myself. But I’m also trying to understand it with compassion instead of condemnation.
Because even if my brain doesn’t respond to the softness of “in advance,” it does respond fiercely when the moment hits. I do show up. I do pull through. I do get it done. Often beautifully, intensely, and with a kind of last-minute brilliance that feels ridiculous and unfair and deeply human.
So I’m learning to work with it. To create micro-urgencies. Fake deadlines. Little sparks of pressure that trick my brain into activation. I treat my calendar like a psychological puzzle. I let myself acknowledge that my brain doesn’t move until it feels. And instead of shaming myself, I adapt around it.
Because urgency isn’t the enemy. Shame is.
If the world won’t adjust to my wiring, then I’ll adjust my methods to my wiring — and still get the damn thing done.
