Radical! Awesome! Mega!

There are days when my brain is firing on all cylinders, and there are days like today when it won't cooperate at all.

It's always been thus for me. There's no obvious reason for it from day to day. Last week I had a couple of days of incredible productivity. Today I have a small but specific goal to write a three-minute piece for Medium, but I can't get it finished.

Yet, this is not procrastination, because I’ve been keen to do this particular task since yesterday morning. I’m not finding other things to do, and I’m not letting myself be distracted by more interesting things. I just can’t make my brain engage.

The day-to-day inconsistency of my brain has characterised my career and education too, whether it's having mental fog on the day of an exam, meeting a work deadline to a lower standard of quality I can't be effective on my allotted polishing day, or missing important details in a meeting despite being much sharper the day before.

This has got me thinking about whether there is a reason that I've simply not discovered. What am I doing differently? Sleep? Last night was fine. Food? I had a bit of chocolate last night, but other than that I was well-behaved all day, and I even drank plenty of fluid. Medications? Exactly the same for eight days running. Distractions? None at all today.

I might be able to find a way to shape my life to work around these days, but I'd rather not have to do that. I want to be able to elect that I will achieve a specific thing on a specific day, and not be thrown off course by an uncooperative brain.

The worst part is how days like this leave me feeling. My mood has plummeted since this morning, and absolutely everything is frustrating me.

I’ve been riffing off the concept of conquering writer’s block by lowering my standards, even though I don't believe what I've experienced this week is technically writer's block.

This morning I used my private stream-of-consciousness journal to write a post about a basic concept, and knocked out 550 words in 20 minutes. The piece will need a second draft, but the idea is now on paper. I could feel it taking shape as I typed.

This might be my initial approach to every post from now on: take a topic from my pile of topics, riff on it for as long there’s something to be said, note what’s valuable, write it again from those chunks. I've amassed dozens of topics against which I've written nothing at all, so I should definitely try this technique with as many of them as I need to. Perhaps that's how I'll come to understand which topics have sufficient merit to end up as published pieces: I assume I'll also come up with new topics as I write, or even find the topic shifting as I progress. That's all positive, and I do think it will complement the way I work.

Every day this week, I’ve sat down fully intending to write a piece with some degree of polish, and throw it up on the internet, either on Medium or my WordPress blog.

Monday was unsuccessful for reasons I didn’t understand, although I did make some progress with a couple of drafts. Tuesday was harder, and some volunteering I did that evening—which is usually no problem for me, and which I normally tear through with relish—was only achieved in fits and starts. Yesterday I woke up feeling properly ill, and gave myself the day off trying to push myself into action.

Today I feel better, but I still can’t get it together to write something for publication. I have a Trello board full of ideas which were electric when I came up with them, but today none of them have helped me get going.

All through this new direction—just 17 days!—I’ve understood that I need to rebuild my writing muscles by writing something, whether it’s here, somewhere professional or in my private nonsense journal. I’ve been taking private notes all week, but they’ve veered hard into the deeply introspective. I’ve not been able to formulate anything of interest to anyone else.

This has got me thinking about procrastination.

In the past I’ve definitely fallen foul of what can easily be described as procrastination: finding something easier to do; letting my attention wander to the nearest shiny object; doomscrolling. More commonly, as I’ve recently learnt from my ADHD diagnosis and treatment, I tend to search for dopamine hits, consciously or without any awareness at all.

This isn’t that, though.

I love writing, so it’s not something I resist. In the past I found it quite easy to smash together a piece to throw online, and even now I have no trouble bashing out 2,000 words of coherent nonsense in just over an hour.

To a degree this is related to confidence, but it’s no longer an issue with fear of others encroaching on my personal boundaries, which I’ve handily and permanently quashed; neither is it a reluctance to be authentic online, with my real name against my opinions.

It’s also related to the standards by which I’m hoping to hold myself, but only where Medium is concerned, because I see publishing there as a long term endeavour.

Ultimately I think it comes down to a combination of two things: a lack of practice in writing to a quality standard for extended periods, and fundamental issues with my brain failing to cooperate when I need it to. The latter is down to neurodivergence, and the former is something I’ll conquer by making writing a habit and a dedicated part of my daily life. I do feel there’s something in addition—depression, for example—but right now I can’t discern what that might be.

The fact that I’ve written this 500 word piece rather quickly shows that writing itself is not the problem, especially when the topic is front and centre in my mind. I'm sure things will loosen up as I push through whatever's going on with me. It's just fascinating, and a little bit deflating, to experience this glacier-like defrosting simultaneously with my enthusiam to write.

I used to write all the time. I’d sit and bang out a flippant but publishable blog post with very little forethought. Words and ideas would spill out of me.

At some point, life got in the way. I couldn’t pinpoint the month or even the year, but I stopped writing altogether—first recreationally, then professionally. I let serious goals get in the way of sensible goals, by which I mean professional growth goals took precedence over achievable goals. I let others’ projected expectations lead me away from my own comfortable expectations. This resulted in some great times, but also some traumatic experiences.

It’s now many years later and I’m rediscovering the joy of writing, for catharsis, achievement, art and pleasure. However, the closer I get to putting words in a public space, the louder the inner monologue becomes.

• ‘Have you lost your ability?’ I know I’m rusty, and every piece of advice I read and see says to just start, because ability comes with experience.
• ‘Will you embarrass yourself?’ The real question is: do I care? If I’m writing for myself, does it matter what people think? Should I be thrown off course by people I don’t know telling me how bad I am at something? Or do I throw up my personal boundaries and keep going? (I already know the answer.)
• ‘Are you as good as you think you are, or even as good as you think you once were?’ I would get excellent responses to my online writing, but that was from people I knew, or at least people I would talk to regularly. That’s never a gauge of objective quality. On the other hand, I enjoyed writing, and I think my pleasure came through in my writing. So, does it matter that I might never have been good at writing, if indeed that’s true?
• ‘Are you just wasting your time with this?’ Maybe, but how much of my life have I wasted on unachievable goals? How many years have I spent pursuing goals which made me unhappy and destroyed my confidence? Writing is a goal I’ve always had, and it’s something I’ve always enjoyed doing, so why shouldn’t I try it? What do I have to lose from giving it a red hot go, and what do I have to gain from taking it seriously?

I come away from these questions with an ever stronger drive to write, but that’s not to say my confidence remains intact. I suppose the only way to know whether I’m capable of sustained, long-term writing is to do it. It can’t be detrimental; in fact, it can only boost my skills.

This is where this particular blog comes in, then. It’s not professional writing that would appeal to an audience, neither is it private writing in an encrypted file that nobody will ever read. It’s public writing in a quiet space that a few people might see, and that I will not choose to defend.

After a few days of thought and two days of living hell with technical issues, I’ve created an additional blog.

• WordPress: For professional work which doesn’t quite belong on Medium. This includes in-depth articles about myself (i.e. in the first person, which isn’t really suitable for Medium), topics which might not do well on Medium, and polished posts I want to bash out without too much thought.

This will give me the freedom to just write without being too stressed about whether it belongs on Medium, whether it will harm my prospects, whether it will make a poor first impression, etc. In the long term I might look at expanding it or monetising it, depending on where all this goes, but for now it’s somewhere to put professional writing that I want to own, unlike what I write here on Blogger.

I’m toying with using I’ve decided to use Posthaven instead of Blogger for this blog too, also for the reason that I would own all my content, but I’ll hold off for now. If I keep making blogs and tinkering with formats, I won’t get any writing done.

(first posted to ooh-thats-mustard.blogspot.com)