To my fellow perfectionist procrastinators,

You’re not lazy. You might explain it that way, this tendency you have to follow Internet rabbit holes or to watch entire seasons of mediocre TV shows rather than writing an essay.

Trust me, I get that. It’s not that I plan to write everything I ever write at two in the morning; it’s that I procrastinate myself into a corner and have to type from there. I never had an adequate way to explain that spectacular failure of my self-preservation instincts. So I brushed it off.

But I’m not lazy. What I am is easily frozen by my own expectations.

It goes like this: I need to do an assignment, I want to do well on the assignment, I don’t know how to do the assignment, I can’t reconcile these two things, and whatever mechanism is responsible for controlling my productivity jams and glitches. I am redirected to a safer task—something mindless, like social media or Netflix. The overloaded part of my brain, soothed somewhat, curls up for a nap. And in that purgatory I stay for hours, all too aware that the second I raise my head from the sand in which it is stuck, I will be making myself vulnerable to failure.

As long as an assignment doesn’t get done, it can’t be done badly. And trust me, a blank page is scary, but it’s nowhere near as scary as a page full of the wrong words.

Of course, at some point—usually once the activity intended to take up my afternoon takes up my night instead—I just have to do it. Two in the morning isn’t so far from the start of the school day.

Despite how it may seem, that ticking clock isn’t suffocating. Actually, it’s freeing. By restricting myself like this, I’ve created an artificial excuse for writing a subpar paper. If I do poorly, or if I’m dissatisfied with my work, it’s because I started with hardly any time to spare, not because I’m a bad writer.

It means my habits are flawed, not my abilities. (The same principle applies to studying for tests while waiting for the teacher to hand them out.) And thus, I am psychologically armored against the possibility of failure—or at least the kind of failure that cuts deepest—and I can finally work.

I didn’t fully recognize this behavior in myself until I read an article from The Atlantic that one of my friends liked on Facebook. In “Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators,” Megan McArdle writes that for people who see talent as immutable, every hurdle is the one that could topple their identity. And it’s an especially common affliction among top English students, those constantly praised for their writing.

“If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are,” McArdle notes. “As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good.” And so, procrastination.

I almost laughed reading that article. It was improbably accurate about my experiences as a student and as a writer, as if someone had observed me over the course of high school and written down their conclusions, analyzing motivations even I had not truly probed.

For the first time, I realized the cycle of self-sabotage was not unique to me. It was not a character defect as damning as laziness; it was a trait directly connected to my history of academic success. It was a nasty side effect of being good at school and rewarded for it—and terrified of losing that validation.

So now, fellow perfectionist procrastinators, I hope to give you that same liberation. You are not alone. You are not lazy. And we are good enough, right now, to start—and to finish.