There have been a few reasons why I haven't wanted to write during the current UK lockdown and surprisingly one of them has actually been a lack of time. Juggling life (or dealing with the lack of one), work and assistance of other people as well as socialising with the family I live with and a few other things, it's somehow felt busy despite not actually knowing what I have been doing for the past year, but it's not even that which is currently making me not want to write. Currently, it's my completely scrambled vocabulary.
I occasionally, in the non-COVID affected normality, make some great gaffs where I use a word and then either think it was the wrong one or completely forget the meaning of the word I just used. I thought it was mainly when I was speaking, but no, it happens regularly when I'm typing as well. Previously they were an odd but amusing occurrence and they were, probably at most, weekly. These days, it is not even weekly, but hourly that I completely lose the word I am trying to get to and can't recall it, or my mind is reaching to recall a word and it kind of does a Groot from the second movie; if it's in the vague vicinity, we'll give it a shot. No prizes for guessing what the last word in that sentence turned into, though I think that was just a bog standard typo.
An example of what I mean was the quiz I was a part of this evening. The answer was wrong anyway (it was actually Pulp Fiction) but I was trying to think of the name of the film Reservoir Dogs, but what my brain spat at me was Riverside Dogs. It's close. It is body of water-related, has similar letters and is a similar length, but no, the film is not called Riverside Dogs (especially not because we were talking about Pulp Fiction, but even if it was Reservoir Dogs...)
With this happening a lot, I'm assuming it's because my brain is under stress. There's a global pandemic going on; stress feels like an appropriate response. I have a few 'life goal' things happening, and still, stress feels like the appropriate response. Writing, though often cathartic, is likely to lead to me putting more stress on my poor, fragile, broken little mind and I am worried about what that kind of stress is doing to my body, and to my mind. It's certainly not helping my anxiety levels, but I know stress contributes to other things as well, so when I feel like writing, I write and when I don't, I don't get too up my own butt about it, because there's a lot going on that I need to be stressed over, or I can't help but be stressed over, and I don't need to give myself anything extra.
I have set myself a goal for this month of around 10,000 words and quite frankly, I'm not too worried if I don't make it. Whilst it would be nice to add to my NaNoWriMo lifetime total, I'm most concerned about keeping myself happy and healthy for the moment and everything else needs to come secondary to that. If it doesn't fit with the goal of being happy and healthy, it has to be less important, or it might have to go.
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