Technically words are getting put on a page. Just not a normally publishing page, except when it’s on social media and in those conversations. Thoughts and processes are still happening.

I shared some plans with a friend, who I’m also in a video chat with right now (we have a twice weekly video chat for a small writing group that keep seeing new faces regularly), about a future bigger article or post I want to write, about some books I’m currently reading. This reminds me I need to return to the post I started about my reading last year. Wonder if I finished it. I had. So now I ended up publishing something even though I didn’t feel like I could write today.

Yet I’m still writing this. I guess that’s why it’s such a common writing advice, just write anything that’s in your head, even if it’s the echos of “I can’t write today, why can’t I write today, what are you doing brain, why are you like this”, and maybe eventually you get somehere. Once you trigger the right pathways in your mind you can maybe keep going. Heck, today it even helped me write this, as well as publish the post I had forgotten that I had finished.

Things are definitely moving forward, and that feels interesting and cool. I had been so proud for the past week or two about my progress with writing, I was often finishing one post during each writing treat session (the chat with friends), and starting another, or starting one and finishing it and reviewing my drafts.

Actually dipping back into my old drafts has been incredibly liberating, because it’s something that’s been nearly impossible for a few years? It’s been very hard for me to go back to a text if I didn’t finish it the first time, or the second time I wrote on it. But because of health reasons I often couldn’t finish it in one go, was it pain, or was it brain fog. I’d have a short spurt of inspiration that I needed to make the most use of. I think my anti-racism for white people blog post took me 1-2 years to actually finish and publish.

I do think it helps my process these days that I am writing about pretty evergreen topics, or topics that are evergreen to me, and always relevant to me. When it comes to a lot of my health conditions and how they effect me from a holistic perspective, that’s never going to go “out of fashion” for me.

There are still articles that were in the now, in the zeitgeist and needed to be written at a very specific time that I was trying to write, but I didn’t complete. However, as life is quite cyclic, a lot of things keep coming back in terms of themes, I do believe there’s a chance for me to come back to it later and keep writing on it.

As you can tell adapting to a slow lifestyle, and not writing about subjects that have to be published right now has it’s pros and cons obviously. But doesn’t everything? There’s never going to be a perfect anything for everyone or anyone. We just have to do the best we can with what we got. Today we got this, out of my brain refusing to let me start writing, and only chatting and checking in with people. And I’m still incredibly happy with it.

Next time you can’t write, you can write about it and share it with us.