Context & Content.
You’ll always find at the top of my post some context and content details.
Context: this isn’t a proper introduction, but it is a start – written in bits in January 2025 – mostly in my notes app, then on laptop. Edited and proofread by my Dad.
Content includes: discussion of Long Covid and chronic illness symptoms (esp. brain fog), comparisons with being ‘well’, complicated mental illness and frustrated writing processes. There is passing mention of applications for gov’t support.
Sometimes I wonder at how hard it is to start something. How impossible the eminently possible feels. We all feel this "impossible tasking" of “things to do” with our messed up brains at times, but I think in some ways starting something creative is different.
I have never felt daunted by a blank page. When I have experienced really bad writer's block it has generally happened much further into a project. At extremes this involved me reading almost the entire Discworld series over two weeks while ignoring my honours thesis. At most other points it involved working on multiple projects at once and jumping between them (making sure they were at different points in the process helped make this less confusing).
But I have, previously to my current life always been a doer and I have pretty much always done it. Showed up and gotten started. Either with a more methodical approach (we love an outline) or occasionally that fizzy excitement of a new idea completely taking over every waking thought and it kind of flows out. Sure there were times when funding stopped projects or collaborators pulled out etc. and some ideas have to wait while you do actually finish other things or work another job. But all in all for most of my creative life starting hasn't been the problem.
Well it is now.
IT IS NOW.
It is kind of the entire problem.
How to generate anything from what feels so often like nothing.
Continuing something is also a problem but that is kind of secondary to beginning if you can't begin.
Nothing is flowing. Nothing comes. There is no fizz and the brain function required to be methodical and think things through just isn't there. Planning feels impossible. Spontaneity even more so. Finding any time and space to feel ready to write just can't happen. It is like there is nothing to start with. And what can you make with that? What can you make from that?
I have become so scared of writing. Scared, because I have been unable to write, because I feel I have failed so many times and also because out of everything it really, starkly exposes how messed up my situation is. How different my brain is.
Depending on how thick the brain fog is I can sometimes do small bits but then nothing in my brain processes the way it used to. There is no consistency. It is uncomfortable, I am never able to achieve flow state and bitsy bits feel so much like crumbs. I could cry. I have cried a lot through this. It is such a lot.
My focus is shot to pieces. If a sentence isn't coming and I think on it, I get a migraine. If I concentrate too hard, I can sometimes feel the sludgy synapses of my brain misfiring. The cogs are stuck, the pressure builds - I can't make connections or link things together. How am I supposed to communicate with anyone if I can’t make sense of what I am trying to write? How many times do I feel the need to apologise for not being able to articulate something I previously wouldn’t have had any problem trying to say?
It’s devastating. It truly has been one of the most heartbreaking losses of being unwell.
Stopping is also a problem. But worst still is when the fog is so bad there is nothing and it is like a gap. A total absence of what should be there, it just isn’t. There is also something to feeling so unwell, so tired, you just know you can’t do something. It is like being defeated before you can even think of beginning.
But when did it become easier to not start? To not even want to start. It hurt too much to even think about doing it/not doing it. If the process becomes that painful, who would choose to try?
I’ve just finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic – which took me forever to read but the whole last chunk about deeply trusting yourself and your creativity but holding it lightly, came as these things often do, at the perfect time.
I have also read many substack essays on starting things this New Year. And while it is very hard to not actively resent all of this energy when you have so little, they have been very inspiring. My “recovery priority” for the first chunk of the year is working out new ways that I am able to write, and I am determined to find ways to make it work. 1
But I haven't written anything longer than a poem or song/scene in literally years. The only application I made in 2023/4 was for PIP. The last finished play I wrote was in 2021. The idea of writing anything, sharing anything, publishing anything is terrifying. A terror I am trying to hold lightly.
But my grip on ‘writing’ is tight, precisely because it matters. For a long time, the first and the only thing I was able to trust was my ability to create and write. I feel now I cannot trust that. This is a loss partly mitigated by new trust in other things, but I cannot trust in what I used to. It is strange to not have this anchor, to not have this certainty, to not hold the identity ‘writer’ in the same way.
Maybe it mattered too much? Maybe I mattered too little.
Of course artists are still artists even if they aren’t making art. But taking a generalised statement like that and applying it to yourself is difficult. Maybe, showing up doesn't matter if what shows up can't do the thing it’s showing up to do?
Except I’ve realised in many ways it does of course matter. It's got to. Because I do. I matter. Regardless of what I can do. And I might not be able to trust in what I can do now, but I do trust myself. And I’m so much more than a writer, even if writing is how I still prefer to understand the world.
I want to be able to write about writing (or not writing) and the practice and process of that. I want to write about recovery (or not) and the practice and process of that.
People talk a lot about the lessons of chronic illness. But I am sick of impossible lessons and just want to live a little. And write a little.
Try and start something.
So here we are.
In wonder.
Thanks for meeting me where I am.
(currently mostly tucked up underneath my duvet).
Love, Tilly x
I’ll report back.
Morning Tilly 👋 Welcome to substack, albeit a delayed welcome! I arrived here after writing a little bit during our time with The Old Vic. I've had a break and thanks to you, I have returned x