[Warning: this post discusses mental health problems and grief]
Look, I've been through some stuff lately, and it's definitely affected me.
My mental health has not been good for the last 10+ years, and now, after losing my mother in February... my head has given me a whole bunch of Very Bad Days lately.
I can't bring myself to go into details, but... it was hell. As a family, we've been through absolute hell since October 2024.
I've said it before - poor mental health makes it extremely difficult for me to write, and not writing makes my mental health even worse.
While I'm still definitely writing stuff - a little on here, a bunch on Medium, and the occasional excruciatingly difficult foray into my Work-In-Progress (WIP,) - it is tough.
Some days are better - I can get the words to fit themselves together, somehow. But... there's no way of knowing, before I sit down to try, whether or not my brain will work correctly at any particular moment.
And believe me, I've tried - my drafts folder/tab-thingy looks like a tornado hit it. There's a whole pile of nonsense in there that I just don't have the energy or cognitive capacity to sort through right now.
The brain fog gets me, and putting words together gets overly-tricksy - putting words together that actually make sense even more so.
Which means that my online writerly/bloggerly prescence, at the moment, is a little all-over-the-place.
And I worry about that - I really do.
Like, right now, writing this post I'm thinking:
- Is this blogpost too similar to my last update post?
- Does anyone still even care about me and Dora Reads?
- Does any of this actually make sense?
- Am I just writing the same thing, over and over again?
- Why won't my thoughts just get in order already?!
- Is it pathetic that I've only committed to one Nerd Church post a month, and even that is one hell of a struggle?
"Is it pathetic that I've only committed to one Nerd Church post a month, and even that is one hell of a struggle?"
ReplyDeleteNo, no and no. And you make absolute sense. And you have every right to recycle (for lack of a better word) things you've already talked about, and dwell on them some more. I hope you can come back in full force when the pain and grief are less raw, though of course they will linger. In the meantime, take care 🧡.
Thanks Roberta <3
DeleteMy mental health isn't good right now, so I really appreciate it *hugs*
It's aggravating when people (almost always not artists) try to act like sadness and struggle are good for artists, when the reality is that it just saps our energy and ability, whether writing, visual art, etc. It seems a lot of us are clinging to our blogs as best as we can despite our struggles. I'm sure anyone who enjoys our stuff will just be glad to get something, even if it's less often than it used to be. Sorry things have been so hard <3
ReplyDeleteSome people can put their pain to good use - occasionally I can even manage it. But overall, I find it much easier to write when I'm feeling good, and when I'm not the writing tends to get incoherent pretty quickly.
DeleteI have been posting a bunch more on Medium - mostly poetry and extremely short fiction - if you wanna read that stuff, the links I post on Twitter are usually 'friend links' these days, which bypass the paywall (gotta get that shameless self-promo in there! Lol.)
Sometimes it feels like everyone is just hanging on by our fingertips... it's probably always been a little like that, it's just that now we're more connected, so can tell each other! <3