Broken Brains

Is it covid, is it parenthood, maybe she's born with it

I feel like my brain’s been broken since I had covid. 12/23 I tested positive; I was negative 11 days later but it took a couple more weeks for the fatigue to fade. Then I caught a cold, a ferocious one my kid brought home from daycare, which hit all the adults who caught it (me, my husband, my in-laws) hard, but it knocked me the absolute fuck out, reviving my awful covid cough, the kind that makes you aware of parts of your bronchial tubes that you never want to notice. It fucking sucked.

That awful week is thankfully now in the rearview, and I seem fully restored to my pre-covid self, aside from the lack of physical stamina you’ll encounter whenever you’re sick for an entire month. (I almost died trying to run across Grand Central—the short axis—to catch a train last night.) But one thing hasn’t come back: my creative, for lack of a better word, spark.

But Jaime, you may say, you’re writing this very newsletter right now! I know, and I’m scared that if I sneeze I will spook it. But it’s not just the motivation to write that’s been lacking. I mean, that has been lacking, but I know as well as anyone, and try to practice what I preach to my students, that the way to get your writing mojo back is to write. Writing begets writing, ideas beget ideas. But the problem isn’t that I don’t have ideas. It’s that I don’t care about them.

Or I do care about them, intellectually. But there’s something that’s missing. The spark, inspiration, that tickly instinct that says ooh this.

I have a project I barely started before I got covid. On paper, it’s super exciting: the topic, the venue, the kind of writing I’ll do, the kinds of questions I’ll dig into. I have a deadline, too, which is usually what it takes to light a fire under my ass. But that fire is nowhere to be found, just its cousin of deadline fear. I feel like I can’t connect to what made the project interesting, like I’m cut off from my curiosity. It’s like the scene near the end of The Golden Compass when Lyra almost gets cut off from her daemon. Except there’s none of the pain and anguish; I’m more like the numb, soulless kids who’ve already had their excisions.

But that’s extremely hyperbolic, not least because those disconnected kids die. I’m not gonna die. I might miss a deadline, or do not quite my best work. Or I might discover that once the fear of a missed deadline overpowers whatever sloggy inertia this is, I’m actually able to access the spark of the idea after all. But I miss it, because I can’t feel it at all now.

I know the answers, such as they are: write anyway, write the bad version; do morning pages, go for walks. Practice low-stakes writing and bad writing and once again ungunk the idea pipes in my brain. But this isn’t quite the stuckness I’ve used those tricks to get out of before. I can write. I’ve just lost access to my sense of the sparkling idea waiting to be born.

It’s impossible to know if this is a lingering covid thing or a result of the month of interruption, the way life got sloggy and sick and overwhelmingly boring. A disconnect from joy and novelty and surprise, not to mention autonomy and, for 11 days, the ability to leave my room. And a lot of that isn’t even just covid. It’s winter, it’s work, it’s the drudgery aspects of parenthood. How am I supposed to feel inspired when my child woke up at 1am and turned his light on and started playing when it was morning? How am I supposed to feel inspired when I feel like my life’s going to be an endless chain of those 1ams stretching as far into the future as I can see?

I skipped therapy today to take a nap, which I feel like is evident from that last paragraph in several ways.

Whenever I’m in some sort of funk, I find myself listing the self-care practices I can try: go for a walk, stretch, take vitamins, whatever. I do it so often that I have to stop myself when I’m tempted to fall into the litany now. I’m 40 years old. I’m not going to discover some new magical self-care practice just by brainstorming. But I went for a walk today. I’m writing this now. (I indulged in some procrastination in switching over to substack, and maybe that novelty will keep me newslettering consistently again for a bit, sort of like lighting a candle on my desk to encourage me to write. Make it a ritual, make it nice.) I hope that if you’re in a slog of your own—winter, illness, parenthood, grief—you keep going through the muck, even without a promise of spark.