My brain has been January-ed
My ability to write has been replaced with old-TV static
Hi friends,
It occurs to me that I started the year with a commitment to finding more disabled joy. A noble aim, right? And one I am still intending to fulfil. Except right now, I am feeling less than joyful. I don’t think I’m the only one.
All the Instagram memes are true: it is day 3290 of January. I know January is always long but honestly this one seems to be taking the mick. It feels like there’s bad news everywhere. And so much to do. And it’s been so flipping cold. Spring can’t come soon enough.
I am, broadly, fine. I don’t want to worry anyone. I think it’s just that between a new PA/carer starting this week, uncertainty around my book, the contents of said book being sometimes quite heavy (to put it mildly), and an unexpected bout of insomnia, I am feeling quite overwhelmed. Maybe you are too, in which case I hope you are able to take a bit of a break.
Normally when I feel overwhelmed, anxiety follows. Mercifully, it hasn’t yet. What has happened is that I have seemingly lost the ability to write.
Not ideal.
A few weeks ago I shared here that I was finding the disability and motherhood chapter of my book emotionally challenging. Imagine my relief when I finished it. “Hurrah!” I thought, “it’ll be plain sailing from here on in.”
All I had left to do before the conclusion was to finish the second half of the chapter on disability and dating that I started six months ago and then inexplicably abandoned. This, I thought, would be a walk in the park, especially as - unlike the motherhood stuff - I have talked about disability and dating, in public, ad nauseum. It’s frankly much less emotionally fraught. And, I have already done the hard part, which is planning and structuring what I want to say. The chapter already exists in bullet-point form. Literally all I have to do is fill in the rest with words. Easy.
So it’s not entirely clear to me why, every day of the last two weeks, I have opened the manuscript, stared at it for a while, and closed it again. Usually, I get writer’s block when I haven’t quite worked out what my point is. But I have, it’s there on the page, all ready for me to turn into prose. Yet every time I try to conjure a good, full, flowing sentence, my internal dictionary plops right out of my head. All I get is fuzzy static. I think I need retuning.
I am fairly sure that my ability to form sentences will come back soon, probably when the new PA has settled in and I have had some decent sleep. But, blimey, it is unsettling to have lost it, even temporarily. It’s even making writing this newsletter a bit of a challenge - as you can probably tell, I didn’t know what to say this week. I figured, though, that we’re here for warts-and-all reality, and the reality is this week I am overwhelmed and oddly wordless, so here we are.
If anything, though, let this newsletter issue be a reminder that productivity is a false ideal. Not only is an excessive focus on achievement really bad for creativity, it’s also deeply ableist and anxiety-inducing to boot. This rambling newsletter is a reminder that you don’t always need to produce perfectly crafted words conveying a perfectly honed idea. Sometimes it’s enough to say: January is long, I feel weird, good words will return shortly.
Hopefully by next week, eh?
See you then,
Lucy
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