Oh boy, hello! I think it’s time for me to write that post on brain fog and how it affects my writing. You see, as I was doing so well with the daily posting I was happily ignorant of the coming crash and thinking to myself, “Look how well I’m doing! Daily blogging! I can easily go for the Rainbow badge, let’s do this!” And well I missed one day after my Assassin’s Creed post but I could easily throw out a second post one day, a little fluff post, that’d do it! Perhaps I could even get a post or two ahead of myself.

Oh how young and naïve I was.

You see, with my disability (fatigue, for the most part) comes a healthy dollop of brain fog. For those of you who don’t know what brain fog is, well it has some crossover with fatigue. But basically, for me at least, it feels like you literally have a heavy cloud over your brain, the fatigue is stronger, and the ability to process information, concentrate, formulate basic sentences, and recall information or words is heavily impaired. I get very sluggish and easily confused and I just have to find something that I can do to pass the time that won’t be too energy intensive so I can rest and repair.

Sadly, writing is one of those tasks that has to be set aside. The act of writing a blog post uses so many parts of the brain, and mine already doesn’t have much power behind it, that it drains me of energy very very easily. So posts like my thoughts on AI? Devastating. Truly. You see, I don’t have the energy at the time, so the energy I end up using for them is basically borrowed energy, which means once I get to that portion of my day? Crash. The brain fog rushes in, the fatigue starts wiggling, and I just can’t function. I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft the past couple days, I resubscribed in the first place because I was having a very low spoon period, it’s just a nice simple game when I can barely do anything, you know?

I’m still slightly in denial that writing does this to me.

I’m a creative person, writing was always my thing. Something I could do! I’ve blogged for years, I want to write books, I GM for TTRPGs and create my own worlds and campaigns, I am a writer. It fucking sucks that it can be so harmful to me.

However, I am learning where my limits are. This is something Blaugust 2024 is teaching me. Exactly what kinds of things I can write, how much I can do, how frequently. I simply cannot do what I used to do. So I may have to admit defeat on the Rainbow award because my health is not worth it, but I’ll be damned if I give up that easily! I still plan to aim for daily blogging, I’ll just allow myself days off when I can see it really, really will not do me any favours. *glances at the past two days*

I am still proud of myself. I honestly did not expect to write more than 3 posts, at the very most, as my history has shown I usually just can’t. Yet I fell right into the daily writing this year and it has been incredible. Here’s to the rest of August!