The Slump

In middle school, I was an assistant teacher for our school's Homework Club. In addition to tutoring students, I would create lesson plans centered around homework management strategies. I remember one of the lesson plans I helped expand was one my mentor teacher had already done for many years. It was based on the book Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating by Brian Tracy. Tracy explains that the best way to stop procrastinating is by tackling your hardest task first; metaphorically, eating the frog first thing in the morning to get it over with. Each student got a bookmark with a frog on it and were asked to write down their "frog", the one task they needed to tackle immediately. Whenever there was a lesson at Homework Club, especially if I had helped to create it, I would try out the tricks that had been taught. The Eat That Frog lesson was no different. No one was more surprised than I when I found myself writing "Do something" on the bookmark.

My message to myself was an important one. It is not as if I was doing nothing: I still woke up every morning, finished my homework, fulfilled my extra-curricular responsibilities... Rather, I felt as if I was getting no where. I call this feeling the slump and, in my opinion, I experience it much too commonly for my personal taste. By nature, I am a do-er, always wanting to fix something or help someone. Every so often, usually right after things are going great,  I'll get stuck in a vicious cycle of lots of ideas and no results. I'll run circles around myself before falling asleep at night. I'll spend all of my free time stressing out about meaningless things or finding bad ways of procrastinating and distracting myself. Sometimes, it seems like I have all these great plans but it is exhausting just to get through a normal day. These are the days when I think, "Do I actually have what it takes to be extraordinary, to make a difference the world?" The first push, the first product that pushes its way out of the slump is always the most painful. There will be many false starts. "Will it be enough? Will they like it? Am I being silly?" Venturing out fully, into the open,  will take Herculean effort. But overcoming these slumps in life is not extraordinary. Acknowledging that these hurdles exist, that there are many more- possibly greater- hurdles that will follow and still pursuing your passions, still fighting for what you love; that's what makes someone extraordinary.

"I want to take over myself first but then, yeah, the world." Farkle Minkus, Girl Meets World