After-effects

It may be age.  It may be exhaustion.  It may be the antibiotics talking.  Or...

For the past few years I've been working flat-out, every spare moment (nearly) going to two businesses both in the starting-up and getting-bigger phase, along with keeping a household ticking over.  You may think that once you go big, things calm down.  Nope.  Still at it day and night and weekends.  You just have to take a look at my lawn to tell I haven't really been "home" in a while.

And I think it's having an effect I hadn't even considered.

Lately it feels like I'm an idiot.  That my brain simply can't get itself around concepts and intelligent thoughts.  That all I am good for is hard physical manual "donkey-work" labour, that merely requires following instructions and plodding forward.  That I'm no longer capable of forming opinions, thinking out answers to complicated problems, learning new things, or doing any kind of creative forward-thinking. 

I think it's the work schedule, the way I have to keep pushing myself through day after day.  And here's why.

Many years ago I had time to sit and do nothing.  I had time not only to daydream, but to take a single thought and go with it from idea to completion, along with any side journeys that might come up.  I had time to imagine and create, time to indulge in flights of fancy and random acts of creativity.  I had a clear idea of who I was, what I thought, what my dreams and plans were.  I had reams of poetry and stories and sketches, and pages and pages of this blog to show for it. 

Although I've recently invested in a couple of paints and had Favourite Man come carrying canvasses in through the door for me, all but 2 are still blank.  I can't form anything in my head that will translate into art.  All my brain does, day after day, is mundane stuff that doesn't require much processing power.  It's gotten used to not being challenged.  It now no longer handles challenges.  Thoughts are scattered, incomplete, random.  And I feel like an idiot.  I simply can't think properly. 

In short, my brain is unfit.

And yes, age may be a factor.  I'm not remembering things as easily as I used to.  I'm not understanding things as easily as I used to.  I no longer consider myself on the upper side of reasonable intelligence, with a sharp mind.  Mostly it's just all a blur.  I've lost myself.

The scariest part?  I don't know if this is reversible....  This may just be the start of a long, downhill journey that leaves me a drooling vegetable at the end.  This, this feeling right now, while I can still come up with a few words to scribble here, may actually be the best I'll be from here on out.