While yes, it’s true that I’ve been struggling with life in general over the past two years, I’ve also been struggling when it comes to writing. Well, the writing part is usually fine, it’s the editing part that gets me.

An old friend of mine said that most of his blog posts are written and edited in his head before they end up on the page. I don’t think it was intentional as such, but he would just mull over it until soul and fingers screamed to put it all into words and on the page. If you know what you’re writing does that mean you don’t have to edit as much? That’s surely what it seemed like with him. I don’t know how much he edited after he wrote things but mostly he’d be done with it pretty quick.

I never quite understood that I had trouble reading, until I went to see an eye doctor for a stress test and they showed me colored overlays at the end of the test. Because I didn’t respond correctly to the overlays he concluded that I didn’t need any, but if I find they they help me I could of course buy some myself. Since then, this was in November 2021, I’ve had even more trouble reading, because I now know what it’s like to read without the struggles I’ve been having.

I went and bought myself some overlays, and they work great, I did some testing on my own and I was reading the same amount of pages in about 75% of the time. This was truly amazing. I was so happy! So excited to keep reading and such. But there was a few issues, this didn’t translate well to computer work and I’ve spent a lot of time looking for “overlay” solutions to the computer, software wise, but not been able to find anything that would work for me. And holding onto books while using the overlay works poorly with my painful hands, so I have to really take effort and read only for a short while before I get too annoyed.

This led me on to understanding that the best solution would be to have the color in my lenses, in the glasses I’m already using for focused work, but for that I need that prescription (I think, I’m too much of a spoonie to research it too much). So I drafted an email to them, as they had said I could come back if things felt different after I got my glasses in December. I’ve yet to send it though.

What does all of this have to do with editing? Well, part of editing is reading what you’ve already written, and that’s my biggest hurdle right now. It’s so uncomfortable to read it, because I know how much nicer it is without all the interference, that I can rarely get through my own written texts. So I have a lot that’s almost done, just needs some polish and I just can’t finish it because I lost the steam where I was just writing straight from my brain, and reading is uncomfortable so I just avoid the editing part. I publish things where it just pours out of me, or where I’ve used the crafting of each paragraph as a way to ground and stabilize myself.

I think two things will follow from here, I will send off that email tomorrow. And I will try to do writing where I’m focusing on crafting paragraphs about the thing that’s been mulling around my mind for a while. Maybe I’ll be able to write and publish more again because of it.