I didn’t use to be a procrastinator. I don’t know where the shift happened, but at some point in the last few years, suddenly I’m not doing everything as early as possible. While I haven’t let it get so bad that it’s affected my academics, this procrastination has seeped into my favorite holiday of all time. Halloween.
As someone who thought up a costume so early, I really didn’t do anything for it until the week of. Which is obviously the worst time to try and piece together a costume. Last year, I was a ladybug, and while I was pretty good about getting my accessories and such together, I did not have any wings. I then realized the week of Halloween was too late for me to order anything from anywhere, and to make matters worse, no stores fostered ladybug-themed items until this year. This resulted in me making my own wings out of wire, elastic, fabric and some glue dots with black glitter on top, AKA a mess. But it turned out cute, and I somehow pulled it off.
I’m facing a similar problem this year, because somehow I didn’t learn my lesson. My costume is a bit more niche, I’m going as Audrey II from my favorite musical, “Little Shop of Horrors,” thank you for asking. This requires me to create a headpiece that resembles the character/puppet from the musical, which is essentially a giant Venus flytrap. At the time of writing this, I only have the base of this headpiece created. I still have to cover the skeleton of it in tape, put paper mache on top, make teeth and paint it. On top of that, I have never touched a paper mache in my life. I am freaking out and running out of time to pull this off. I know this, and yet I can’t bring myself to work on it. I realize now that this feeling of needing to get up and do something, but unable to, is typically called ADHD paralysis.
When thinking about how difficult Halloween has gotten for me, I’m reminded of the Tweet that says, “We don’t talk enough about how stressful Halloween costumes are for the ADHD community,” to which someone lovingly replied, “Omg you people can’t do anything.”This quote is constantly in my head, and especially right now, I’m just like…damn, I really can’t do anything.
But I’m hoping the deadline I have now will push me into getting some work done.
Since I’m not going to be procrastinating this article anymore, for the rest of the week, I can focus on what matters: the awesome digicam pics I will have of my costume and the extra hour of celebration we all get with Daylight Saving Time dropping on Halloween. Bless up. With this motivation, I’m gonna lock in majorly so I can actually celebrate and enjoy the Halloween season. Or just get medicated, whichever one comes first.
