Please, my brain... it's very stupid

Anyone else just feeling dumber than a bag of hammers lately? Just a useless bundle of limbs animated by a soggy pile of old banana peels in your skull?

Please say yes or I’ll feel bad.

These days, I’m dumber than the day I was born. I’m not capable of much else than listening to the same two (2) Kate Bush songs on repeat. I spend the time that should be devoted to job-hunting perusing the internet for a specific novelty sweatshirt that I think should exist. I mix up words. Yesterday I said something fully incomprehensible because I was trying to talk and tie my shoes at the same time. I torpedoed a perfectly good Tinder conversation that I was having with a promising match by pivoting from the topic of flirty emojis with the question “so on a scale of 1-10, what’s your despair levels like these days? 😘”

(It’s possible that that last blunder shouldn’t be blamed on Pandemic Brain but rather my own romantic ineptitude, but I’m chalking it up as part of the same trend.)

I know that I’m not the only one feeling dumb and useless nowadays, because my therapist sent me this helpful video about how chronic stress makes your brain dumb and useless when I complained to her about it. Katie Heaney wrote a piece for The Cut entitled “I Miss Having Ideas” in early September, which I just discovered recently because my brain is too dumb to read stuff lately, and it’s very validating as well. She interviews experts that confirm that being constantly stressed out of your mind is not the ideal circumstance for being creative. So yes, I know that it’s not my fault and it’s in fact a fully human response to being bombarded with ever-escalating, ever more confusing, ever more threatening developments in the world. Still doesn’t feel great, though!

I had a brief boost of hope and inspiration when it looked like the pr*sident might d*e. The future seemed full of possibilities again. I felt like a Munchkin who was pretty sure a house was about to fall on the Wicked Witch of the East. But that lil serotonin boost dipped as soon as that dipshit barreled, steroid-riddled, back out into the world to infect more people with his germs and personality.

I’m trying to find ways to put my brain in rice, and so far all I’ve gotten is being on Twitter less. I think it’s helping, but I’m not sure yet. Perhaps one day a thought will return to my brain and I’ll say “nature is healing 💕” but it’s too soon for such optimism.

Anyway, it was just National Coming Out Day and I’d like to come out as a giant idiot. Also bisexual. That part’s old news, though. The moron stuff is new but it seems like it’s here to stay. I’m here, I’m queer, I’m dumb as absolute hell, and we all need to get used to it!!

More like this:

“I’m too weak for this”

“Thinking about ‘All Summer in a Day’”

“Eccentricities I have considered adopting in These Trying Times™”