I don’t have a lot to say at the moment. This is what happens when I’m wading through an especially busy period at work. My head gets so full of my clients’ opinions that it can be a struggle to retain my own voice, let alone carve out the time and opportunity to make it heard.

I want to be dutifully updating my website with thoughts about COP26, MPs’ second jobs, or why the BBC news website is publishing so much truly appalling content. But of late, when I sit down in front of my laptop, I find myself bereft of the ability to form coherent personal commentary.

Instead, all I have are supply chain challenges, venture capital and planned changes to the Highway Code. These are interesting topics (even the Highway Code one, I promise). But they’re my clients’ focus areas, and everything would be so much easier if I could switch these subjects off once in a while – say, during the evenings or at weekends.

It’s a strange old conundrum. Like most people, I want to do work that I find engaging, and I’m lucky to have a number of clients doing things that genuinely fascinate me. But the problem with things that are fascinating is it’s really hard to stop thinking about them…

Of course, when the work is uninspiring, there’s no motivation to get stuck into it. That’s how things started to feel six months into the pandemic, writing article after article about Covid – the new normal, the old normal, the hybrid normal, the need to plan for the post-pandemic world versus the need to plan for the possibility that the pandemic wasn’t going away. I must have written 50,000 words about the pandemic. More, if you include this paragraph.

So it’s good that my current working world is anything but dull. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But there’s been an awful lot to get my head around lately, and when every piece of writing also requires an education, the job can be all-consuming, affording scant mental availability to everything else that’s happening in the world.

I’m assuming I’m not the only professional writer to feel this way (although I’m probably the only one currently obsessing over the Highway Code). And sometimes, all we can do is admit to our loved ones that we’re not really following the family WhatsApp group, or the climate conference, or anything else for that matter, because we’re lost in random thought, and they’d be better checking back in with us in a fortnight, by which time we may have found ourselves again.

Photo by Romello Williams on Unsplash