Hi Indie, I was wondering first of all -- if you didn't have to do schoolwork, do you already have an idea of what you'd be choosing to do instead? If not... what do you suppose it might be?

Second, by any chance do you have anything going on about school possibly not being good for you in some way? I mention this because (Warning -- digression coming up! ) in high school I was always getting good grades just naturally, without having to go out of my way or "work" at it. They'd give me homework, I'd find at least part of it interesting, and I'd do it partly because I was interested, partly to see if I could. Sure, I enjoyed finding (and of course demonstrating) that I could get more answers right than most of the other kids. I also had a bit of a reputation to maintain; the teachers seemed to think I was smart and I didn't want to disappoint them by, say, screwing up a homework assignment or something. It felt to me like an uneasy truce. I didn't particularly trust "the system". I figured the teachers always could trip me up by assigning more homework than I could finish or asking me questions that I couldn't answer. They didn't usually do that to me, though, so I tried to hold up my end as well as I could. If there was a certain amount of stuff I was expected to learn and I seemed to be learning it more or less on schedule, I figured I had to either be lucky or be doing something right.

When I got to college, everything changed drastically. I discovered that in some classes where I would've expected to do well, the grading was "on the curve". The way to get an A was no longer to learn a certain amount of material in a certain amount of time, but to dig into an overwhelming mass of subject matter and somehow be able to answer questions on it better than most of my classmates. This seemed completely perverse to me and I resented the heck out of it. I felt I was no longer just being taught interesting information that would be useful to me in what I was planning to do; I was being taught (first and foremost, as I saw it) to compete. I found myself ruminating about what they were trying to do to me -- to turn me, apparently, into a kind of person that I didn't much like and that I didn't think anyone else would like either. I may very well have been mistaken about a lot of this but there didn't seem to be anyone available to point out to me that I was.

OK, digression over. Not that you and I are that much alike but still, I was wondering if you might possibly have anything at all like that going on about school or studying or whatever.

I've never had much luck with "making" myself do anything. What it always seems to come down to is, if I have to make myself do something, then it's something that I've chosen not to do and I'm just going through the motions of doing it to keep someone else from giving me a hard time about it.

What I find really interesting (though I wasn't aware of this till long after I was done with school) is that "just going through the motions" can work both ways. Once upon a time I'd volunteered for a very arduous weekend with a team that was helping to put on a workshop. We'd all been up ridiculously late the night before, setting up the room, and now it was 6 AM, time to wake up and head back to the site to greet and support the participants. I sat up in bed. "**** them all," I said. "I'm not going!" I said that the whole time I was getting dressed. It took me a while to figure out that I really did want to be there and that I was just going through the motions of protesting that I didn't.


Is there any chance that some of your previous motivation came from feeling that you had no choice but to work hard in school? I was thinking that as you got older and started to notice that you did have some choices, that might also have been when you started discovering that doing homework wasn't really your first choice.

I posted something about procrastination when I was still quite new here. I'm wondering if there's anything there of interest to you: http://forums.psychcentral.com/showt...90#post1034590

My parents were always very big on teaching me to avoid "laziness" but I never really got the point of it. Nowadays I even wonder if there's any such thing. Lazy, it seems to me, is what someone else might call me for doing what I want to do instead of what they want me to do. At 16 (hey, that's right, you're 16!) I was the kind of kid who (a.) would rather work 24 hours to fabricate a part for my bike than wait 24 hours for the store to open so I could buy it, and (b.) who at the same time was too lazy to pick up after myself or to start my homework when I was supposed to.

Something that used to bother me most of the way through school was that there were a number of things I hated doing, such as writing papers against a deadline. Meanwhile, if I should succeed in school, I was preparing myself for a career of... writing papers against a deadline.