Huh

I saw a thing the other day that was basically this: if you're feeling tired and crappy and unproductive, it's not a moral failing, it's covid brain. Your brain is in (extended slow-burn) survival mode, so it shunts effort (and blood flow and stuff) away from things like higher-level thinking / planning / etc and towards staying alive, and if you're feeling less creative it's because your brain is putting all your creative muscles towards staying alive, and if you're sleeping more it's partly because your brain is burning energy much faster than usual. Etc.

I just realized: combine that with my realization a few months ago that I've basically been living with impending uncertainty for years, much longer than the pandemic, and that aide stress/uncertainty and health stress/uncertainty has probably been fucking with my brain

and you get a major dose of "why the fuck am I surprised I can't write"

Especially since typing is hard (can't physically access keyboard for touch typing, computer typing is done by mouse and onscreen keyboard which is painfully slow, phone and tablet typing is done with thumbs and a lot of typos (and autocarrot) and is faster but more prone to error) and ... ... yeah.

I mean, I'm also getting fewer ideas, definitely fewer "this story is basically writing itself" / "this story is requiring that I write it, and won't leave me alone until I do" stuff, but it's not that I don't have any (I was going back through my "fic I'm not writing" tag and found fairly recent stuff I'd forgotten about). It's just they don't get written. Or I write the sort of thing I call a fic sketch where it's not really fleshed out (or even necessarily grammatical) but has the important bits, but don't have the energy to go back and finish it.

But.

If, in survival mode, brains are less good at thinking and being creative--

--and if I've been in survival mode pretty much for years--

--well, *fuck*.