Let me tell you about the past 6 months or so.
I worked on a project that I loved so much I didn’t want it to end.
Sometimes projects are like that when the stars align. It was a fairly tight deadline, pedal-to-the-metal. But communication was great and the project itself was lovely.
However, all good things, as they say, etc etc.
I was due to attend the final mix for the project when I got Covid. A little tickly cough and then the rest of it ensued. Off for 2+ weeks and then I was straight into jury duty of the worst kind. No speeding tickets for me, little miss who’d managed to postpone it 3 times instead of the officially-allowed one.
Such was my karmic punishment (I shouldn’t think, but I do) for multiple delays: a case so disturbing and drawn out that instead of the usual 2 years refusal that jurors typically get after completing their civic duty, we all on this particular jury now have 10 years refusal. 10 years in which if I get called up again, I can just outright say no.
I don’t really want to talk about it and you likely don’t need to know, let’s just leave it in the past where it belongs.
After all that drama of luscious fun highs and then fatigue and then putting up mental defences, well, I don’t mind telling you I was a bit… done.
I’ve been crawling out of that hole for some months now, and now I think I’m pretty much there. It seems the only hangover from omicron is a more extreme version of my inability to remember names. Usually, I’m quite bad at remembering nouns as it is, but I get there in the end. This is just a more extreme version where no matter how hard I try the word just isn’t there. It’s an odd sensation. I have a feel for the sound of the word (which is unsurprising given my training), and I can see the image in my mind’s eye, but, if I imagine it, there’s a strange whitish gap in the mental database where usually I would reach in and wrestle the word to light.
No more. The word simply isn’t there.
Until I play the game of Guess the Word (what’s that game called? Ah yes, Articulate!) and someone in the vicinity puts me out of my misery by remembering it for me.
And so it goes.
In the midst of the hole, I picked up the Artist’s Way. It had been sitting on my shelf since last year when I’d half-heartedly started and promptly let slide once I was into the thick of my DYCP project. But I was casting about, a little desperately, for something to buoy me up over the riptide that tugged daily at me, down, down into ‘What’s the point?’ territory. In that place, nothing good happens.
I remembered what it was like to be interested in doing things, and in finding fun in the world, but I was having a bit of a hard time accessing it. I class it (unqualified as I am to diagnose) as a mild case of anhedonia, brought on mostly by post-covid fatigue (there were days when lifting my arms was a bit of push, but it got no worse than that).
I missed that lovely project, the one where my natural style was perfect for the job, I was working with generous, talented, capable and reliable people, and the project itself was really funny and lovely. So much so that, every day I was writing, I would be laughing out loud at the same jokes, writing delightfully whimsical and mystically magical music, with an environmental twist to boot.
Like I say, perfect for me.
So I mourned the passing of the project (though it’ll be on the telly this Christmas in the UK so I can relive it then), I dealt with the undercurrent of rage from jury duty and waited to get stronger from the plague. The Artist’s Way has also been pulling me through. More projects allow me to bury myself in them. I visit the ducks, pigeons, geese and seagulls down at the pond often! I avoid all but the most cursory glance at the news. And, tf, I’m back.