Above the Fog

My blurry brain woke up. Here's why, plus glimpses of the past and the future

Jan 25, 2023

Perugia, an island in the fog. Photo © Cheryl A. Ossola

Cari amici,

Hi there. Yep, me again. I know, I know, I said you wouldn’t hear from me this week, but I want to follow up on my last letter because a few things have happened and I want to address them while they’re still fresh in my mind.

First, the good news: I’ve been successful at implementing strategies to regain focus and minimize distraction. I’m reading deeply—finished a meaty nonfiction book and am well into another, finished a novel and started another. Back in the day (meaning pre-Covid), I always read two books at once, one fiction and one nonfiction; since Covid I’ve done that in a scattershot way, starting multiple books and finishing none. Now, with significantly more time devoted to reading and with renewed perseverance, I’m finishing what I start. And I’m nose-to-grindstone on my next novel, doing a fundamental revision and seeing characters and motivations and obstacles with more clarity.

Insomma (in short, to sum up), I have pierced that infernal shroud of fog around my brain and gone deeper, immersed myself. More clarity, more focus, and (important!) more determination.

So, why the change—at all, much less in only a week? Well, let’s qualify that by saying I’m not sure if it’s an actual change in status or a change in my perception of that status. I suspect it’s the latter. Basically, I decided that being foggy all the time wasn’t okay, and barring any reasonable evidence that I ever had Covid (zero illnesses, few known exposures, no symptoms, all negative tests), my brain fog must be situational (partly; see below where I’m shouting), not clinical.

Some proof of that: I did manage, post-lockdowns, to revise novel number 2 into a hopefully publishable state, which in all my fussing and whining about brain fog I conveniently forgot to give myself credit for. As for not getting back to novel number 3 until now, for me it’s normal to take some downtime between books; I can’t pull my head out of one story and immediately plunge into another. More proof: I’ve been writing these letters week after week—34 of them, to be exact. True, my mental sharpness and stamina hasn’t been at pre-Covid levels, but that doesn’t mean I was incapacitated.

So I did some soul-searching. I thought about all those months of lockdown and the habits I’d formed that aren’t healthy, like doomscrolling. And I realized that I’d continued with all that very unhealthy social media time, which was making me feel scattered and distracting me from being productive, because it was easy.

Easy! That’s really sad, isn’t it? Waiting for water to boil, I’d pick up the phone and scroll. Eating alone, worried about getting sugo on my book? Pick up the phone and scroll. A task requiring thought or focus seems overwhelming? Pick up the phone and scroll. It’s easier than writing, easier than studying Italian, easier than doing the many things on my to-do list. It’s a form of procrastination.

Also easy: defaulting to watching TV. I don’t mean choosing high-quality shows or movies that are well worth anyone’s time, whether in English or Italian. I mean scrolling through show after show with complete disinterest, and then watching some mindless/inane/poorly written drivel. Because doing anything else seemed too much like work.

Basta. It was time for some tough-love self-talk. Because if there’s nothing clinically wrong that’s preventing me from going deep, then I have to do it. I have to retrain my brain, fight the effects of excessive amounts of social media, resist my sloth-like tendencies. That means reading for more than 10 minutes at a time, writing the novel, conquering that congiuntivo (subjunctive mood in Italian). Apologies for invoking Yoda, but he’s got a point: there is no try, only do.

The thing about writing books is that you have to actually write the blasted things. Sure, it’s easy (there’s that word again) to toss around phrases like “my novel-in-progress” and “my next book,” but if you haven’t put words on the page in months (and I mean months), exactly how much progress is being made? If I was whining about wanting to get back to novel number 3, then clearly I was ready to do so. I needed to—as my not-at-all-prone-to-using-bad-language mother would say at appropriate times—shit or get off the pot. So I did. I’m off the pot, making that choice. And it’s going great.*

(* “Great” means I’ll hate it the next time I read it. But such is the process of writing and revision, and I actually love revising. By the way, the working title is Sister of Lucrezia, and it’s set here in Perugia. It seems to be turning into a psychological thriller, which I didn’t think it was, but works-in-progress are nothing if not opinionated and pushy.)

So at this point I’m doing, sometimes, and trying, sometimes (sorry, Yoda)—but there’s determination behind my failures. Now—not always, but often—I pick up a book instead of the phone, despite the risks of red sauce. Waiting for the water to boil, I clean up the kitchen or do some stretches. If a notification shrieks at me while I’m writing or reading, I continue until I reach a good stopping point. (Next step: silence the phone.) And TV? I’m making watching films and shows a choice, not a default. Fringe benefit: I’m reading more.

What I’m saying might sound simplistic and probably sounds holier-than-thou, and I don’t mean it that way. I don’t mean to minimize the fact that plenty of people have legitimate physiologically induced brain fog and similar hurdles that demand more than a week of navel-gazing to overcome, nor am I suggesting that my mother’s colorful advice is a cure-all. And I do believe the lockdowns hurt us psychologically and perhaps mentally and had lasting effects. But lasting doesn’t mean permanent.

I believe I’d accepted feeling distracted and dull as my new normal. I had accepted a negative state as something beyond my control that hopefully would improve with time. And now I don’t.

BUT ALSO THIS WEEK (yes, I’m shouting here) I read this very smart and very terrifying article about the long-term negative effects of social media, which validates what I and many of you said about the decline of our mental states as a result of a social-media-dominated solitary existence. It’s true—social media does distract us and dumb us down, and on a larger scale it’s threatening democracy. It’s not just Gurwinder, the author of the article (which I urge, no, beg you to read) who says that; one of my readers recently heard Filipino journalist and Nobel Peace Prize–winner Maria Ressa, speaking to an American audience, call social media the biggest threat to democracy, now or ever. Like any problem, this one must be acknowledged before it can be fixed, and given the fractured state of American society and the divided state of the U.S. government, I worry that not enough consciousness can be raised to combat it. (And because, after all, we are talking about capitalism.)

Before I post the link, I want to share with you two passages from my current nonfiction read, The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance, by Ross King. They’re about a dark, frightening period and the emergence from that period, and taken together they give me hope:

“Petrarch’s cheerless view of recent history was no doubt shaped by the fact that he lived in what one historian famously called ‘the calamitous fourteenth century.’ Around the time of Petrarch’s birth in the early 1300s, the upward curve of progress and prosperity was suddenly arrested. The climate changed: the weather grew colder and stormier as what climatologists call the ‘Little Ice Age’ took hold. The glaciers advanced, torrential rains fell, crops failed, and people starved to death—some four thousand people in Florence alone during a famine in 1347. Economic hardship followed the collapse of the two great Florentine banking houses, the Peruzzi in 1343 and the Bardi in 1346, after the King of England, Edward III, failed to repay vast sums of money borrowed to prosecute his costly war against France. […] Its battles and sieges were interrupted by regular outbreaks of the plague: not just during the Black Death of 1348, which wiped out at least a third of Europe’s population, but again in the years 1363, 1374, 1383, 1389, and 1400.”

Sounds kinda familiar, no? But wait! Here’s what comes later, after two long paragraphs about widespread, vicious violence, the failing papacy, and the tragic decline of Rome:

“Yet this violent, decaying city [Rome] held clues to a better world. In the early 1370s, one of Petrarch’s friends, Giovanni Dondi, an astronomer from Padua, went to Rome and was struck by what he saw. He noted in a letter that certain ‘sensitive persons’ were eagerly looking for and inspecting Rome’s antiquities. Anyone who looked at these ancient statues and reliefs […] was amazed by their quality and by the ‘natural genius’ of the ancient artists who had created them. The ancients, Dondi was forced to admit, had been far superior than the moderns at making art and architecture. Further, the ancient Romans had more, too, in the way of such desirable qualities as justice, courage, temperance, and prudence. ‘Our minds are of inferior quality,’ he glumly concluded.”

But minds got better over time, and ours can too. Maybe we too are in a cycle of decline. Maybe we have to look to the past, to a pre-digital time, to set ourselves on a better course. Of course we won’t go back to our analog existences, but sometimes we’re so quick to embrace the new that we forget what’s good about we what had. Which reminds me of the scene in the movie The Intern when one of 70-year-old Ben’s colleagues (a classic T-shirt-and-backpack startup employee) struts into the office one day with a vintage 1973 leather briefcase just like Ben’s. Sometimes old is the new cool.

We can step off the furiously spinning merry-go-round—or maybe it’s an endless, high-velocity people mover that’s hurtling us into the future. We need books made of paper, coffee shared with real-life friends (how sad that the text messaging abbreviation “irl” even exists), art and other kinds of projects that take time, that are done by hand, whose genesis isn’t limited by a ticking clock/paycheck/bottom line.

We can think, create, feel. We don’t have to give up our beloved technology (what, and say goodbye to all of you?). But we don’t have to give in to it either.

Wow, I didn’t know I was going to go on a tirade. Anyway, who’s in?

Here’s the article. It’s called “TikTok Is a Chinese Superweapon: A weapon of mass distraction.” If I needed another reason not to do BookTok (I don’t), this is it.