Writing

On Getting Unstuck

June 14, 2026June 14, 2026 Kara JorgensenLeave a comment

As an author who has been struggling this year to write due to life chaos, I think I have found (re-found?) the key to unstuck myself. This panacea is two-fold, and a good chunk of you are absolutely going to hate the answer I’m about to give. The key to getting unstuck is time and doing something else.

Please take a moment to unclench your jaw and relax your shoulders. If you are shrimping, stop that and fix your spin.

Yes, I, too, was mortified to realize that the best way to get unstuck was literally to do nothing, put the writing project aside, and do something else for a bit.

During the first few weeks of feeling burnt out, I tried to rest. I was still taking Katie to and from her vet appointments for radiation (she’s doing great btw), so rest wasn’t exactly restful. I did that for probably two more weeks after her treatments finished. I just did nothing when I could. My time was spent letting my mind and body decompress because I could still feel myself instantly shoot into fight or flight mode any time anything stressful happened. That ended up being the litmus test I used to decide if I was okay going back to doing anything productive beyond the necessities. Playing farming/dating style video games became a way for me to decompress. They require brain power but no real emotional stress. I also watched a bunch of Deadliest Catch along with old shows that I have seen repeatedly. The familiarity and repetition were soothing. Books also helped. I read a lot while Katie was getting her treatments, and I read quite a bit. At the same time, there were weeks where I struggled to read because the words kept bouncing off my brain. If you can’t read or can only do audiobooks, don’t be surprised. My partner also helped out more during this time when it came to things like dinner and other tasks that could be taken off my plate. It helped a lot.

When I no longer felt like my brain was going to shoot straight into the sky is falling mode any time something minor happened, I moved onto rereading my story and taking some notes as to what I wanted to change with it. Writing came in fits and starts. Part of me really wanted to hit the ground running and just write. I had promised my readers this short story, and god damn it, I was going to deliver. Yeah, bad idea. Beating yourself will only set you back and start inching you back to fight or flight. I gave myself the goal of working on the story. If I opened the document and toodled with it at all, it counted as working. Some days I added a couple hundred words. Other days I added twenty. I could feel the capitalist productivity mindset breathing down my neck, but I resisted its siren song. I went through burn out in 2018 and never want to repeat it again. Trying to be creatively productive while fried is a recipe for not writing for a whole year or overworking a project to death, scrapping it, and starting over. You might think you’re wasting time now, but I’d rather waste a month now toodling than a year beating my head against the wall and feeling bad about myself for doing it.

Something that also really helped was playing around with other creative outlets. I worked on some plastic canvas village pieces, which have patterns pre-planned for you and are repetitive. The mindful yet mindlessness behind them helps the brain cool down. I often think about how many injured soldiers after WWI went through rehabilitation where they did crafts, like do embroidery or sew fancy wallets. Crafts and the arts have been used for centuries, and they are a good place to start if you’re feeling overwrought. The problem with drawing and painting is that it often requires you to keep thinking the way writing does. The planning aspect requires more executive function than we have, so my solution is to air on the side having premade instructions or patterns. I can follow a pattern and reproduce something, even when fried. It takes the guesswork and higher thought out of it.

After getting back into the swing of writing, I am very glad that I listened to my body and brain and slowed down as much as I could. The Victorians and Edwardians got a lot wrong, but sending overwrought people to the seaside for three months to decompress recover was an idea we should have kept around. I’m probably 80% of the way back to normal and still guarded with my brain and energy levels, but I feel so much better than I did in April and May. My writing is going far more smoothly, and I’m actually excited to work on creative projects. My partner and I have actually been brainstorming something we can collaborate on, and that has been fueling my creativity in my writing as well. People talk a lot about refilling your well to help you write, and it is very true. You need to take care of your brain and body and listen when the internal check engine light comes on. Sometimes, it is impossible to slow down completely but cutting back where you can and off-loading some responsibilities to others temporarily can make a world of difference in how fast you recover.

Personal Life

On Autism and Disability

April 19, 2026April 19, 2026 Kara Jorgensen2 Comments

April is Autism Acceptance Month, and right now, I’m reminded of how autism is a part of who I am but also very much a disability. If you want to know what it feels like to be autistic and seemingly low support needs in our society, it’s like being told you’re supposed to juggle constantly, but you aren’t very good at juggling and people keep adding balls. When you’re in front of people (if you’re good at masking your autism or have a job), you can manage to juggle decently for an audience for a while. Sometimes, they even think you’re good at it, but the second you’re alone, you start dropping balls and getting mad at yourself for doing so. No matter how much you practice, you really aren’t good at it, but if the conditions are perfect and you’re feeling good mentally, you can manage more balls than usual. The problem is that other people see that, assume you can do that all the time like they can, and get mad at you when you can’t consistently perform. Is the metaphor a little tortured? Probably, but it serves its purpose.

Right now, I’m juggling a lot of balls, my arms are tired, and I think some of the balls might be on fire. That’s the problem with being a seemingly low support needs autistic person with a master’s degree; people assume you are consistently fine and expect you to perform as such. When I was younger, I used to be able to hold it together to the end of the semester, and once it ended, I would crash and be completely unable to function for like a week. As a 30+ year old adult, I no longer am able to do that without a very large cost physically, emotionally, and mentally, and I refuse to do so. Unfortunately, I can’t call out sick with autism or autistic burnout.

If you’ve been following the dog saga this year, you know all of the trauma and chaos that has unfolded in my life since February. If you haven’t, the Reader’s Digest version is that my oldest dog died, my middle dog scared the shit out of me by bleeding heavily and spitting out a benign tumor (he’s fine now), and my youngest dog had a soft tissue sarcoma on her nose and is currently going through daily radiation treatments. To say 2026 has been a stressful year is an understatement. One of the emotional components of autism is that you don’t process emotions like a neurotypical person, which means I’m great in an emergency and an emotional wreck on a random Tuesday when I’m suddenly whacked over the head with whatever emotion I should have felt in the moment. When a lot of high emotion things have been going on, I don’t always know what I’m feeling or what I’m upset about beyond overwhelmed. As you can imagine, not knowing what you’re feeling or why makes dealing with those emotions difficult.

In order to deal with that stress, my body has decided that the best course of action is to stay in fight or flight mode 24/7. After weeks of hypervigilance, I am emotionally and physically exhausted. Being in that state makes it hard to get anything done beyond what I force myself to do (like grading papers) and even that is slower than I would like. It also causes my chronic health issues to kick up. Most autistic people have several comorbidities that are tied to connective tissue disorders. For me, this is autoimmune problems and hypermobility that is likely some form of Ehlers Danlos. The autistic burnout feeds into the autoimmune issue which in turn worsens the burnout by sucking up your energy reserves and making you feel crappy. It becomes a vicious cycle until your ability to function is well and truly in the shitter.

More than anything, I would like to lay on the floor with my dogs and watch Kitchen Nightmares or Ghost Hunters for a week straight without a single thing brought to my attention that could stress me out. With our current administration, I doubt that would be possible, but I’m trying to cling onto what functionality I have until the last few weeks of the semester are over. I was lamenting on Bluesky about how I wish Biden was president again solely because I know I would be handling all of this better without the background noise of political chaos. I had major autistic burnout during Trump’s first administration in 2018 to the point that I tanked what momentum I had built with my writing career. I really don’t want to do that again, and the only good thing about experiencing it once is that it’s easier to recognize (hopefully) the next time.

The point of this post wasn’t to listen to me gripe about how my life has been sucky for the past few months but to illustrate that autistic adults who have partners, jobs, driver’s licenses, etc. are still disabled. I appreciate having autism for the strong sense of justice/fairness, the different way I think and view the world, etc., yet I’m still disabled. Our society isn’t set up for people to say, “I need a week long time out because my nerves are fried.” Most jobs will tell you to either take vacation you might not have or to find a new job, and ultimately, this is one of the many reasons autistic adults end up under- or unemployed. If I wasn’t in academia where I work only a few days a week and have summers off, I would be fried constantly. The trade off is that I make abysmally low pay and am underemployed. Most of us would love to find a situation where we could do something we’re good at under conditions that don’t make us pray for death or feel unappreciated. When we tell you that we can’t do something or that we truly don’t want to, please believe that we aren’t just being difficult. It takes a toll on us that is far greater than what neurotypical people experience, and what’s an inconvenience for you is something that causes us to be less than functional for several days. We save up our energy or functionality and carefully plan how to allocate it, so when plans change or something unexpected happens, we end up paying the price for it.

On Rest

December 11, 2022December 7, 2022 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I fucked up. That’s due to the belated realization that I didn’t listen to my body when I really needed to rest.

If you read last week’s blog post, you may have noticed the section on writing where I mentioned I struggled and was a bit fried. Historically, November is a bad month for me. It’s a yearly clusterfuck where lots of grading and keeping track of all the things my classes have due intersects with the time change and the days getting shorter, which also intersects with seeing giant NaNoWriMo word counts (this is a morale sapper since I write small-ish daily word counts). I logically know that November is a bad mental month for me as I tend to use up more brainpower between work and Christmas prep and have less spoons in general. And yet, my dumb ass continues to do what it has been doing at a pace it is not capable of without consequences.

I feel like I dragged my tired corpse through November while chanting the refrain of “You did it in October and September, and you can do it again.” Am I more organized and driven than I’ve been in previous years? Yes. Does November still kick my ass despite all that? Apparently so.

Since the end of last year, I’ve been using the HB90 method for goal setting, project planning, etc., and it has been very helpful. The problem is that I blissfully forgot or willfully ignored that November kicks my butt. Somehow, I thought, I have my shit together this year and am doing well. Surely this won’t happen this year.

Sadly, I felt it coming before I was aware of what was happening and still ignored it. I struggled at the end of October to get through my word count goals. I chocked that up to my book launching and not really having my head fully in the game due to launch anxiety, which was a reasonable assessment. The problem was that the feeling persisted into November and only got worse. By the middle of November, I was drained. I had edited a bunch of research papers (longest and most thorough paper my students write, which means it takes the most brain power to give feedback on), I was struggling to read books with any consistency (a major red flag for me), and my writing was only happening in fits and starts. I would fall behind, then pound out a thousand words, then not write again for several days in an endless cycle of misery and disappointment. The biggest, most obvious indication should have been the all-consuming yearning to play Stardew Valley. Yes, my friends, my desire to play that video game usually means my brain is shot and needs serotonin. I can mindless do tasks, play for hours, and feel accomplished as my crops grow and I romance Shane, my favorite hot mess. It’s something I know is basically my check engine light coming on, but I ignored it anyway because I was already behind on my writing and I couldn’t fall more behind playing video games.

Well, guess what, I never caught up. At some point, I hit 8,000 of the 10,000 words and said, we’re good. I admitted defeat after blowing a tire on my car in a near accident. I’m now starting to wonder if the brain drain contributed to that as well, but it was the wake up call I needed to stop for a bit and try to refill my creative well. Since the very end of November, I’ve been reading more, just sort of vegging while watching shows I like, and playing a bit of Stardew Valley before bed. It has helped a lot. I’m starting to feel like I can think straight again, though I know some of that is because the semester is also about to end.

If there’s one thing I need to get better at, it’s listening to my body when it comes to productivity and writing. It gave me so many warning signs that I need to pause for a day or two, but I ignored them to avoid “falling behind” on arbitrary deadlines I set for myself. Now, instead of taking a day or two off to reset, I’ve had to take a full week off. It certainly isn’t the worst outcome, but I’m annoyed at myself for making things needlessly worse. In my bullet journal for 2023, I’m going to make a signs of burnout page to remind myself that sometimes I need to just rest and decompress, that the work will be there tomorrow, and the only one putting pressure on me is me.

If you’re like me and starting to feel the chafe of burnout, please, take a step back, do something that brings you joy, and just exist for a bit. Don’t do or try to force, just rest. Whatever resting looks like to you, take this as the universe’s way of telling you to go rest. You deserve it, you don’t need to earn it, just give the well a chance to refill.