It’s not like I want to avoid doing homework. If anything, I would even go as far as to say I enjoy it. The sense of satisfaction, like I’m actually doing something productive with my life, is rewarding enough as it is. I do work to distract myself from the real world. Studying, doing worksheets, writing, whatever it is that my teachers want of me keeps my mind off of things around me.

But then I procrastinate to keep my mind off of homework. Weird, isn’t it? I would rather be doing anything else than what I’m supposed to be doing. I get stressed by homework, usually by no fault of anyone but myself, and then I stop to do something else and get stressed I’m not doing homework. It’s such a vicious cycle of self-blame and self-doubt.

Sure, many factors have to be accounted for my lack of motivation; teachers, home, world issues, etc. But it would be unaware of me if I deflected and directed all the blame. It wasn’t the teacher’s fault I refuse to open my textbook to learn the material, it’s not my family that’s encouraging me to take 4-hour breaks in between every 30-minute homework session, and it’s definitely not the world who told me to sleep my days away rather than acknowledge my responsibilities. But accepting your own faults can be so difficult and I would rather be stuck in a bubble than to accept them.

It brings into question whether or not I’m deserving of being an adult. As soon as I get out of high school, I’ll just be going right back except this time, I don’t have the comfort of someone hand-holding me or the excuses of “I’m just a teenager, I don’t know better.” If I can’t juggle a few assignments with my personal life, what makes me think I’d be able to survive in college or when I start working? I don’t have anyone there to tell me what I should do, though granted I never really had that support system to begin with. I feel like I’m still stuck in my younger child self while everyone around me is starting to get a grip. I’m stuck in a writer’s block, rewriting the same few paragraphs or lines over and over again while kids my age have started turning the page. I can lie to myself and say, “Well, the longer I write something over and over again, the better it becomes!” I know that’s wishful thinking and I’ll just move on from that small section having never made it the way I or other people wanted it to be, living in regret that it’ll never be what it should be.