Radical! Awesome! Mega!

Now that it's been a billion years since I last published any writing—thanks to volunteering commitments and depression—it's time to revisit my writing structure.

• My diarrhoea blog will continue (or resume, depending on how you look at it), but in a cheaper and more accessible place.
• My Trello board, full of half-written articles, will need a clean-out, whether that means finishing and publishing pieces, chucking them in purgatory my backlog, or deleting them.
• I'll need to get some more writing up on Medium. One article per century isn't exactly a streak.
• BigBeefBurger.com will need more substance, and perhaps repurposing.
• I should be using this blog (right here, hello, hi) to talk myself back on my feet.

Depression be damned. I enjoy writing too much to watch it fester.

To build myself up to a consistent and reliable level of productivity, I’ve taken to allocating 30–60 minutes to sit/stand in isolation and write nonstop. Mostly I’ll pull a topic off my Trello board and riff on it, but sometimes I’ll just type whatever’s in my head and follow my thoughts wherever they go. So far it’s working incredibly well, at least in terms of turning my ideas into properly articulated arguments.

This was always the purpose of my private stream-of-consciousness journal. What I’ve realised this week is how effectively it can turn an unproductive morning or day into a productive one. If the first ten minutes are rubbish, usually I’m much better structured and more cogent by the end.

Although I now have the bones of a few solid posts, tidying them up for publication is still beyond me, for now. This is as much down to my neurodivergent struggles as my need to build skills and establish habits.

I’m still reluctant to set myself goals for publishing on Medium because I don’t know when I can find the focus and confidence to get that final polish done. I’d like it to be within a week, but if I set that goal and fail to meet it, I’ll feel worse about myself and less confident about my ability. So, for now I’ll keep doing this as often as possible. If I write 50 drafts and publish nothing, at least I’ll have 20 posts close to completion.

It seems my inability to write this past week was due to illness.

At first I thought the ADHD medication wasn’t working. Then I thought I was just terrible at writing. It’s only yesterday that I realised I’ve been sick, and not only last week. I was struggling to focus in a volunteering engagement a couple of weeks ago. Looking back, it’s been obvious I was fighting off a virus, I just didn’t connect the dots.

This is a sequence which happens to me at least once every year: enduring brain fog, followed by frustration and fear that I can’t get things done, followed by the creeping realisation that I was unwell the whole time. Usually the trigger is a sore throat, or sinus pain, or noticing that I’ve had 12 hours of sleep three nights running.

Today I’m feeling more switched on than I have in about a week, so perhaps I’m recovering. Now I’m finding myself pulled between the need to rest patiently and the drive to get some work done. Some of the brain fog is still there, so rest might win for the time being.

That’s not to say I ground to a halt. I’ve had ideas and made plenty of notes, and dealt with another WordPress technical issue which hoovered up the best part of two days. So, there’s definitely been progress, just not the kind of progress you can see.

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.