STAGE ONE:

Feeling awesome. You receive the task/assignment. You decide to take care of it early so you don’t stress yourself out like every other time. You got this. 

STAGE TWO:

Chillin’. You haven’t started working on it yet, but you’re thinking about it. That counts, right? There’s still time. You’re totally still gonna rock this shit.

STAGE THREE:

Limbo. The deadline is rapidly approaching, but the situation isn’t dire yet. It’s cool. You’re gonna start at the end of the hour, you swear. Just gonna stay on tumblr a little longer…

STAGE FOUR:

First moment of real fear. Hours after you told yourself you would start taking care of this thing, you finally get around to getting all your shit together and taking a long, hard look at what you have to do. It is then that you realize the sheer magnitude of what you’ve blown off until now. You don’t even finish seriously examining the miles of work laid out before you. You physically can’t. 

STAGE FIVE:

Denial. After a small scale panic attack, your sense of self-preservation kicks in. You manage to convince yourself that this is not actually happening. The situation is not real. You actually recoil from the task and retreat back into whatever you were doing beforehand as if everything is normal and if you don’t think about it, you’ll be okay. Your flight or flight mechanism is triggered, and you fly like a little bitch. 

STAGE SIX: 

Desperate bid for escape. You can’t pretend everything’s okay forever. There are snakes on this plane, motherfucker. You come up with increasingly extreme and life-threatening ways you can possibly get out of this responsibility. You consider spiking your own drink with eye drops. Can you pull off fake food poisoning if you can actually force yourself to puke? Maybe you can just pretend to trip and throw yourself in front of a passing car. You are a danger to yourself and others. You are a mad person.

STAGE SEVEN:

Sheer, unadulterated terror. There is no way around this. There is no way out. You are fucked. You have let so much time go by and now you are completely fucked and there’s nothing you can do about it. Panic. Engage crisis mode.

STAGE EIGHT:

Emotional breakdown.

STAGE NINE:

Robot mode. You realize that have brought this shit upon yourself, and it has to get done. You wipe the snot off of your face and force yourself to finally be productive. It is probably some ungodly hour of the morning. You lose all other abilities to function. You have been drained of human emotions. You are a soulless cyborg, mechanically finishing the task you have been assigned. This goes on for several hours, probably all the way until the deadline. If anyone actually tries to engage in some form of interaction with you, you will probably kill them. You will feel no remorse.

STAGE TEN:

Crash. It’s over. You’re done. You’re actually done. You don’t know what to do with yourself, but you’re exhausted and in roughly the same mental state as a bran muffin. You promise that you will never do this to yourself again, and you wonder why you allow it to happen every time. You reflect on how much less stressful your life would be if you just handled things responsibly. Yes, next time. Next time you will do better. 

STAGE ELEVEN:

Repeat.