Blogging vs Brain Fog

Sometimes I'll mention struggling with brain fog to people and they'll respond something like "ugh, I know right, I hate when that happens 🙄" as if I told them someone cut in front of me at the grocery store. I don't know how to make them understand that this isn't a minor inconvenience to me, it's debilitating. There are certain days where it's so bad, that I straight up can't get anything done. Where doing basic tasks or holding a basic conversation is a challenge for me.

It's come to a point recently where it's not just impacting stuff like chores or work, even just trying to engage in hobbies feels like too much sometimes. Blogging should be so easy for me. It's literally just typing into a box. It should be so. Damn. Easy. And yet, every time I sit down to do it, I feel like I can't think clearly.

"Well if you streamlined your website workflow..." My workflow isn't complicated. All my posts are written in Markdown, the only time I run into hiccups is if I have to use certain HTML elements. The issue for me isn't formatting the text, it's coming up with the right words, it's thinking clearly about any given topic for more than a minute.

I recently learned about the 100 Days To Offload Challenge, a challenge for personal bloggers to publish 100 posts in the span of a year. There are no strict start or end dates, that span of 365 days can start whenever you want it to.

When I first read about it a little part of my brain said "oh, I could totally do that!" and started brainstorming ways I could make it work. I have over 100 unfinished drafts in Obsidian. The challenge could then just be a matter of finishing/polishing as many of them as possible. I also started thinking that it might be helpful to set up a consistent schedule for blogging.

It was at this point that I realized I was considering turning my hobby into a job, which is not what I ever intended my little hobby site to be. Obviously I wouldn't be making money from it, but I mean more so in the sense of setting so many expectations for myself. Setting up deadlines and quotas. Not that any of that even matters, because I'm not able to form a coherent thought most of the time, anyway.

The more I thought about it, the more I started feeling really disappointed in myself. I couldn't help but compare myself to all the bloggers I know who put out long, well-written content on a near-daily basis

I looked at my post archive and I felt disappointed with myself that I was only able to get 13 posts out all year. The toxic positivity part of my brain wants to spin it around. "You managed to still get stuff out, even when you weren't feeling well, you should be proud of yourself!" Another part of my brain just wants me to shut up, because it's not like any of this really matters anyway. "It's not that serious, stop whining about it!".

It's not just writing posts, it's reading other peoples blogs too. Sometimes I have trouble fully understanding what other people are talking about. For longer posts or posts that discuss more complicated topics, I usually use text-to-speech to read the post out loud to me. It can sometimes be easier for me to understand spoken language over text, but that doesn't guarantee full comprehension. It's a lot of listening to and replaying the same paragraph over and over again until I either fully understand or I give up.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people in my personal life think I'm stupid. I don't think people fully understand how embarrassing it is to be an adult who can't do "basic" things some of the time. I don't think they understand how embarrassing it is to have to ask other grown adults for help so often, or having to constantly ask people to please be patient with you.

If you think that's bad, imagine how it feels when I'm trying to read actual books. Imagine how it felt trying to read books for school, especially when I got to college. All the constant "READING COMPREHENSION IS DEAD 🤪" "jokes" on social media don't help either.