How To Write When You’re OVERSTIMULATED and UNMOTIVATED
On finding homeostasis when your nervous system only knows extremes
One thing about this week (and last week, and the week before that, and the months before that) is that the world is crazy. The collective energy is buzzing with anger, and grief, and confusion, and passion, and movement simultaneously.
If you’re a highly sensitive person (or quite literally just a person at all) it has been near impossible to process. I’ve been taking time offline, setting boundaries with my phone, and evaluating what it all means for my writing.
When the energy around me spikes in such a serious way, I get this feeling where I have so many words stuck in my throat that I physically cannot speak. I can’t write. I can’t move sometimes (*cough cough* hello eldest daughter fight/freeze response cycle).
In all seriousness, I’m full of a phantom, frantic energy that cements me wherever I’m at. I know I should be pushing words onto the page but instead the energy freezes me there.
I am trapped in a haunted house of my own creativity. Everything’s overgrown with ivy and dust, the floorboards creak under the weight of all the things I need to say, but I can’t figure out how to move through the rooms without everything feeling too loud and too quiet all at once.
Here’s what I do about that.