Personal Experience: Procrastination, Gratitude, and Motivation

 Procrastination? Guilty! I've been a professional procrastinator since day 1 of middle school up until college. I have gone through countless seasons of "productivity" where I stop, but ultimately the cycle seems inevitable for me. It can also be hard to find motivation to be productive. I think it all circles back to one thing: gratitude. 

I was assigned a lab report over a month ago, and even past the due date I haven't completed it. My class offers "Tokens" to make up for late work, and I chose to utilize that the night of the deadline for the assignment. I now have 1 week until the deadline to use my token for the Lab Report. Yesterday, I was working on an advocacy assignment for another class and was researching the discrimination and genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. In scanning an article on the topic, I read the following quote from a 16 year old girl being forced to live in a "modern ghetto": 

"I want to study more. I want to be a doctor, but I can't because the authorities won't let us. Even if I studied really hard they won't let me go."

This one hit me really close to home since I plan to pursue a career in the medical field. I teared up and got so mad at myself for complaining about all of my assignments. I thought to myself, what am I doing? I am sitting complaining about being able to have an amazing education; meanwhile there are people in other countries who DREAM of having what I have. People who would stop at nothing to reach academic goals that I whine about every damn day. I got up, and walked to my desk and began working on everything I was putting off so I could have more time to scroll on social media, or hangout with friends.

I think that parents now-a-days don't teach children enough gratitude. How lucky are we to have an education at all? How lucky are we to have access to internet, freedom of speech, freedom to practice our religion, freedom to be able to go to the hospital, get married, or have children. The Rohingya Muslims don't even have human rights because they've been denied citizenship by extreme Buddhist officials in Myanmar since 1982. I think the world population needs to put things like this into perspective.

How lucky are we. 


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