Two of the “worst things in the world” for me are writer’s block and autistic inertia. These aren’t objectively the “worst things,” like panic attacks, ear infections or failure to use the Oxford comma, but they are some of the things that feel the worst to me in the moment.
Writer’s block, the inability to write, can get so bad it can drive people to suicide – notably, Ernest Hemingway – and I myself remember lying on the floor of a research office at Google for hours, unable to start work on with a paper I wanted to write, knew how to write, and had already written the outline for.
I eventually wrote that paper (and if I recall correctly, it was published here) but it is true to this day that I can be writing gangbusters on one project (240,000 words on Legacy of the Extra Credit Project) but can get completely stymied on switching gears to another (such as a Prosocial Robotics paper back in January).
That’s why, for me, I suspect that writer’s block is a subspecies of autistic inertia. Autistic inertia is a phenomenon documented in the autistic community where people “on the spectrum” like me have a marked difficulty starting or stopping tasks.
For example, blogging.
For me, this applies not to just technical things, like writing scientific papers, but to anything that involves interacting with people, like social media or even just sending emails. Recently, I had trouble sending out social media posts for the Seventh Annual Embodied AI Website even though I’d already drafted the text.
That increased social factor makes me suspect that my autistic inertia is also tied to my social anxiety disorder – that weird miscalibration that I have which makes many simple social situations difficult to initiate and stressful while they’re happing.
Regardless of the cause, I often find myself unable to start tasks that I want to start, or unable to stop work on something that I feel that I should put aside. This can mean that one task, like, say, writing a novel, can steamroll a variety of other tasks, like, say, blogging.
But I saw a friend doing the Blogging A to Z Challenge, and I thought, hey, I can do writing challenges.
So I thought I’d share that: one way to overcome the worst thing in the world is to find a structure that forces you to get onto the path of conquering it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the bathroom in our San Jose home, which we had renovated during the pandemic, and my wife painted after the pandemic, but which we dallied for a long time on installing towel racks. On our most recent trip out here, I got tired of stacking bath towels atop the toilet (gross!) during the shower, and forced myself to (a) track down the fixtures we used in the bathroom (discontinued!) (b) seek out an alternative (c) buy them and (d) install them before my wife was scheduled to arrive. And when I was done, I asked …
… why the hell hadn’t I done this earlier?
