Procrastination is an art form

I’ve written before about adult colouring books – a way to procrastinate that calms your mind and can help you deal with stress. This year I’ve taken on a whole new kind of procrastination – teaching myself to play guitar.

My partner has three guitars taking up a lot of room in our small flat, so over Christmas I said that he either had to start playing them again (he hadn’t touched them in over a year) or get rid of them.

Because he is as stubborn as I am, he started playing again. Listening to him play made me think about how I actually really like guitar, and I was jealous that he was able to do it and I wasn’t. Then I thought ‘Well, why can’t I learn to play guitar? There’s nothing stopping me – other than my own laziness and fear of not being very good at it’.

One day I waited until he was at work so that I had the place to myself and I YouTubed ‘how to play guitar’. I found a good tutorial, picked up his guitar and very, very, very slowly started to get the hang of basic chords. I’ve looked up guitar lessons and they are crazily expensive (£35 for an hour is not something I can afford) but fortunately once I was brave enough to tell my partner, he has been helping me with some of the difficult bits.

It took me weeks to convince my hand that this was a normal position! 

I am slowly getting better, and I’ve found it’s the perfect procrastination activity because I’m actually doing something I really enjoy and learning new things. Even better, my partner made me a deal; if I kept playing for a month, he would buy me my own guitar for our anniversary! Because I love things and presents I kept going with it and because he is far too generous I now have my very own.

I felt particularly loved when this was delivered. 

Problematically, he hasn’t gotten rid of any of his, so for now we have four guitars and very little room for anything else. When he suggested getting a keyboard I told him that was fine so long as he got rid of his desk!

I’m really glad I decided to give it a go; it’s given us something to do together, and it’s given me something to do in the evening other than play computer games or work. My competitive side means that I won’t give up until I am at least as good as my partner, but my ego is struggling with still not being very good, so at the moment it’s a battle between the two – I hope the competitive side wins because I do really enjoy it.

Emma