From The Literary Hub:
It’s an odd thing to continue to show up at the page when the brain and the fingers you bring to the keyboard have changed. Before the daily pain and head-fog of rheumatoid disease, I could sit at my computer and dive headlong into text for hours. Like many writers, I had a quasi-religious attachment to the feeling of jet-fuel production, the clear writing process of my twenties: the silence I required, the brand of pen I chose when I wrote long-hand, those hours when I would sit and pour out words and forget to breathe.
Then, I thought that my steel-trap focus made for good writing, but I confess that I’m not sure what “good writing” means anymore. For example, what happens when the fogged writing you thought was sub-par results in your most popular book?
Nine years ago, I began to experience the carnival of symptoms heralding the arrival of a few autoimmune diseases. In addition to hormonal imbalances and pain, a “brain fog” descended. This cognitive impairment to memory and concentration is shared by people with Multiple Sclerosis, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome), and a bunch of other conditions, and the cause may vary with the condition. It’s unclear what causes the fog, though in many cases, disrupted sleep is part of the culprit. Plus, pain makes it harder to concentrate.
Today I am tired—despite a full night’s sleep—merely because I had a busy workday yesterday. I’m actually hungover, in a sense, from standing upright and talking between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm. Before I got sick, I would have declared this day a rare lost cause. But this is the new normal. Now, even the magic of caffeine doesn’t allow me to smash through the pages like I used to. As my body and mind changed, I feared that I would become unhinged from text itself, and from the thinking and insight that text provides. In a way, that did happen. Over the past decade, I have had to remake my contract with sentences and with every step of the writing process. The good thing is that there’s plasticity in that relationship, as long as I am patient.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
You get used to brain fog. When my brain clears a bit, I try not to waste the limited time it will stay on.
After almost three decades of this nonsense, I’ve still managed to publish – but the work comes very slowly (we’ll have to find a subsitute for ‘glacially,’ what with climate change).
Maybe we could use ‘politicianaly’ 😀
It’s a possibility the OP was trying too hard at being creative, too much focus and demand on perfection. Which in turn might have made their work a bit to controlled and stilted. The ‘fogged’ work may be smoother flowing and make more sense to the readers.
It used to be called going with the flow.
I’ve seen similar in new electronic designs, everything it seems ‘must’ now be remote controllable by a phone app.
(Just saw a post of all those ‘Internet of Things’ showing their evil side. You may have kicked your ex out of the house, but they most likely still have full access to you IoT lights/music/thermostat …)
Inspiring, thank you.
I need to keep this bit in mind, on my foggy days:
“I look into the fog and remind myself not to be scared of the pause. Out of this silent fog, another thought will emerge. Eventually. The key is to not panic in the face of this void. If I relax, and pick sentence by sentence through how things feel, paragraphs still come.”
You’re welcome, Anthea.