Running Dry: Notes on Writing through Brain Fog

Brain fog isn’t an official medical diagnosis; rather, it’s a colloquial term for a range of significant, persistent neurocognitive impairments that cause such symptoms as sluggish thinking, difficulty processing information, forgetfulness, and an inability to focus, pay attention, or concentrate. With Long COVID, the exact combination of brain fog symptoms varies from one person to the next.

– Kathy Katella, “Long COVID Brain Fog: What It Is and How to Manage It,” Yale Medicine News

Brainstorm, zero draft, morning pages, freewrite, stream of consciousness.

It has lots of names. I call mine WordSpring.

WordSpring has been my writing process for as long as I’ve been writing. At least 35 years. All I do is set a time or a number of pages and just let them spill out. The words flow free. My only job is to tap the source and, in the immortal words of Natalie Goldberg, “keep the hand moving.”

Occasionally I come to the spring with a theme in mind. Sometimes it’s just an opening and whatever emerges becomes the beginning of a project. More often than I care to admit, it’s all process and no outcome. Just the flow and whatever is called to the surface.

There are far more efficient approaches to writing. WordSpring is useless in a deadline context, and is a pretty convoluted way to achieve structure. It can take hours of flow, then another day or week or more, to dredge the volumes. Teasing out the threads and then weaving them into a coherent idea is arduous work. 

It is also enchanted work. The WordSpring is far more than a tool for generating material. It is a place of spirit. The free-associative, dreamlike quality of writing this way means “I” (the conscious, self-identified Shannon) am not controlling the process. Instead, WordSpring surfaces images and concepts that belong to some other realm. Seemingly nonsensical connections emerge that my heavily fortified, rational mind cannot even perceive.

The creative source of the WordSpring begins in a place deeper than I can measure. Words in a familiar language may spill through me but I am usually not aware of their meaning until after they have landed on the page. The art is as much a revelation to me as it is to any reader. 

It’s magic. It’s a marvel. 

But.

But I have not posted on this blog since January.

January, when I went back to work.

And drove myself straight into the ground. 

Now, nearly six months later, I am still sick. Sicker now than I’ve ever been in my life. Sicker now by far than I was in January.

I have not posted since January because WordSpring no longer works as a writing process.

Because my brain no longer works as a conduit for WordSpring. 

Because there is no making of coherence from flow.

There is no coherence.

There is barely any flow.

I write, sure. Every so often I open a journal and get a few words down on the page. On a good day, if I’ve slept extra and haven’t exerted myself in any other dimension of my life, I might even find my way to my WordSpring.

But in just a few minutes, it puddles and runs dry. 

Long COVID and ME/CFS have erased my ability to write. 

Symptoms can vary, but some of the major issues include a lack of recall for things like names, places, events, etc., as well as a general inability to process complex tasks, hold concentration over time and multi-task… In some instances, general alertness can be affected as well which, when combined with the intense fatigue experienced by many, can be extremely debilitating in terms of interacting socially or functioning at school or work.

– Prof. Stephen Griffin, virologist at the University of Leeds School of Medicine, in Medical News Today

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“Brain fog.” The term is almost cute. It’s a little cartoon cloud passing through the skull. Birds and stars, a bit of muddle in an otherwise normal day.

Let me assure you, brain fog is far more monstrous than its name.

Brain fog is a kind of poisoning.

When I sit down to do any task that requires cognitive exertion, I now have 10-15 minutes. At around the 10-15 minute mark, dizziness sets in. Vision blurs. Sense dissolves. My mind cannot hold onto even two simple ideas at the same time. My mind becomes a murky, foggy, cluttered jumble.

That’s 10-15 minutes at a sitting. Maybe 1-2 sittings a day on a good day. Half an hour of cognitive activity for the whole day, and that’s on the generous end. 

When I was first back at work, I could push through and be productive (though pitifully so, and with frequent rest breaks) for a few hours in a day. The pushing had dire consequences. Nausea and shakiness. Extreme dizziness. Fatigue so crushing my eyes could not stay open. At the end of the day came splitting headaches, chills, GI issues, limb weakness, and a full-body collapse that would land me in bed for the better part of a week.

But I could push through. At the beginning.

Not anymore. Now my body and mind simply will not. 

With Long COVID and ME/CFS, cognitive activity is exertion. And exertion is poison. It floods the system like a stealth drugging, like an unknown biological agent released in the vents. My head falls back, my lids drag themselves closed. Whatever project was before me disintegrates into a pile of rubble. If I can haul my eyelids open again, what I read makes no sense. I have already forgotten the context. The map has burned in the wreckage. 

This happens with any task requiring cognitive and visual processing.

Almost every activity of personal and professional life involves working at the nexus of vision and cognition. The tremendous neurological effort required is not evident until it breaks down.

Consider everything that fits into this category. How many times a day are these functions required? How automatically do they come to the able-bodied (and able-minded) among us? Writing makes the list. But so do filling out forms, mapping commutes, studying, making calculations, reading instructions, participating in meetings, shopping for groceries, sorting data, paying bills. On and on and on. 

Most of us don’t think of anything on this list as exertion. I certainly didn’t. In 2022, I could work for eight hours doing hundreds if not thousands of these tasks every day and still have ample capacity left over for a gym workout, errands, homework help, and bar trivia.

Right now, my brain gives me 10-15 minutes at a go. That may be enough for opening the tap on a WordSpring, but that’s it. That luxurious swim in images and ideas? Gone. The many hours needed to give shape to the beautiful chaos? Also gone.

If only I could let go. 

But I am hungry to document the story of this condition and the damage that it has done – that it is doing – to this body and mind. The hunger is so powerful it hurts. At a time when I most need writing to navigate this illness and the upheaval it has triggered, writing is not within reach.

Even as I compose this, I feel it crumbling. This essay, or whatever this is, has taken multiple sittings and countless revisions over many days. And it is deteriorating before my eyes.

I keep getting lost. The images that flowed at the start had shape and substance. They were recognizable. But the longer I stay in here trying to draw them up to the surface, the more they dissipate. Tricks of light scattering to nothing.

For today I am immensely grateful for these 10-15 minutes. These minutes are not guaranteed. If the projected course of this illness is any guide, there’s a good chance I will lose the ability to write altogether, at least for a time. Especially if I try to push harder to regain what has been lost.

While I am working on acceptance of this illness, I am not yet ready to accept the possibility that my WordSpring has run dry. I need to write, and so I will write this way even as I seek other expressive paths.

In the meantime, the words that end up here on SmirkPretty are going to be sloppy, infrequent, and poorly edited. There will be far too many of them. They will fail to coalesce, mapped as they are onto my own fragmentation. 

I beg your indulgence. This is one of the few places where that deeply connected sense of wholeness is still available to me. WordSpring helps me remember that whatever is beyond us is still holding every one of us, even when (especially when?) we are living in free-fall.