Afraid to Fail, Afraid to Succeed

I think about really random things when I take a bath. I guess it's the quiet and the solitude...and the lavender scent that brings my creative side out from underneath the mental chatter.

Procrastination. That's what I was thinking about today. Why writers procrastinate. And I came up with a number of frivolous things including:

1. Nothing to say
2. Fingers cramping
3. Pretty clouds out the window
4. Sleepy
5. Distracted by a book
6. Racing thoughts
7. Bored

Yeah, so none of these are great reasons. But you know what is? Fear. Fear of failure and fear of success. Which leaves you - guess what! - doing absolutely nothing.

I'm about 30 pages away from the end of the first edit of my manuscript. I avoid working on it for various reasons, but at the end of the day it all comes down to fear. Both of the fears I've mentioned above, although they each come out at different times.

When you think about fear of failure it's pretty easy to describe. Failure is very external and seems obvious. Maybe people will say you suck, or your book won't sell many copies, or you'll be laughed at by your peers, or you'll be labeled something or other based on your work.

But when you think about fear of success, it's different. It's less about others and more about you, making it perhaps even more scary that fear of failure. For me, fear of success looks like this:

• Will I get excited about what I created, and then ultimately be disappointed if/when failure comes down the line? 
• Will I not know what to do next now that I'm finished? 
• Will this be my one and only literary achievement, and will my dream stop there?

I used to procrastinate because of fear of failure. I never thought I was a good enough writer so I'd put it off as long as possible (that way I wouldn't have to stare at my failure on paper). But these days my craft is improving, I'm studying a lot, I'm reading a lot, I'm working hard. And now I've moved to the other side where I'm afraid of success and what it entails.

So let me ask you...have you ever found yourself afraid of one, or both? And do you find that it causes you to avoid your work? I think the whole point of this blog is to say that sometimes procrastination is a little bit deeper than just being distracted or bored or tired. And that maybe if you can identify those fears, you can work past them.