my brain will not comply

not even with itself

This week, the relentless, oppressive heat in London overwhelmed me to the point that my brain shut down. It’s not just the direct impacts that the heat brings. My children have been going to bed later, waking up earlier, and insisting on spending these extra waking hours by my side, complaining about whatever is in front of them as a proxy for being hot and tired. I was travelling to my office every day to spend the day in industrial air con; the benefit of being in a cool room for a few hours outweighed the horrors of increasing my step count outside.

By Wednesday, the overwhelming sensory experience of heat paired with an inability to find time to recover along the way left me completely unable to concentrate. I couldn’t even focus on short-form video designed to hold your attention. In the morning, I started preparing for a meeting by reading through my notes to remind myself where we left things. After reading them four times and not remembering a single word, I accepted that the ability to read and retain information had temporarily left me. It’s important to accept one’s limitations, whether temporary or not, as natural as being unable to wade through mud. You can fight your way and make it through eventually, but you’ll have used a lot of time and energy to do so.

A younger version of me would have stubbornly pushed through, beating myself up along the way for ‘failing’ to engage my brain. Now I’m older and wiser, though, I accept that my brain fog isn’t a sign of personal weakness. So, rather than spiralling into frustration and self-criticism, I focused on acknowledging my limits and adapting my expectations of how much I would be able to achieve accordingly. This helped me prevent reaching the depths that negative self-talk can achieve, which in turn will help me to escape the fog quicker.

So many times, I’ve come out the other side of the fog only to find that I stumbled into a pit of despair along the way. Being kind to myself means treading lightly through the fog, noticing when it's thick and heavy around me, gently edging forward even if only a few centimetres at a time. I know the fog will clear eventually, and when it does, I want to be able to put all my energy into running to catch up rather than picking myself up and dusting off the disbelief I’ve curated.

Now, acceptance is all well and good, but it has its limits. There’s nothing a doctor is going to do for a day or two of brain fog, including signing me off work. Even if they did, my employer won’t continue employing me if I down tools every time the weather overstimulates my brain. I live in Britain; we have a lot of weather.

Over the course of my life, I’ve been obsessed with processes and systems to find ways to accommodate the difficulties I experience from my neurotype. I have multiple notebooks so I can jot down thoughts when I have them, and process them depending on which one I’ve written in. I use bullet notation from bullet journaling to indicate if I’m making a note or something more actionable. I write things down as much as possible to remind myself what happened when and with whom. I have notes for the food and drinks I’ve enjoyed at a restaurant, and even notes about the people I’ve met so I can build better relationships. But when my brain fogs up, it doesn’t matter, because I can’t keep enough thoughts straight in my head to consume what I’ve written and turn it into meaning.

As we undergo the AI revolution, I’m looking to the technology for tools to help me overcome some of the gaps I still have. Even though I struggled to read and enact my to-do list, I could easily create a custom GPT to process my raw meeting notes and turn them into something more structured and meaningful. Concentrating on something that interests and excites is often easier, and I actively look for things that trigger these states as I can use them to build momentum out of the fog. I built this GPT to output an overview of the meeting, key themes with details from my notes, and list out the actions. It’s not perfect, but it did better than me this week! I hope that I will see benefits last beyond the moments of brain fog that are becoming increasingly frequent as I’m becoming a woman of a certain age, because I haven’t been able to develop a technique to go from raw to structured notes yet.

I hope one day I’ll have a suite of custom GPTs to share with the world. As with all accessibility accommodations, they can be used by the able and disabled alike to improve access. For now, though, I’ll be keeping quiet about the accommodations I put in place for myself. If someone asks me about my process, I will, of course, share it with them, but I won’t be broadcasting that I’ve created it in the first place. Finding difficulty in tasks many consider easy can lead others to question one's abilities in all areas. However, what’s a foundational skill for one isn’t necessarily for others. Understanding and accepting these differences as normal parts of cognitive diversity means we can better support ourselves and others in overcoming what each individual finds difficult. Recognising that my strengths and struggles coexist helps me resist internalising external judgments of laziness or an unwillingness to engage with work I don’t want to do.

The lesson I’m taking from this challenging week is to continue being kinder to myself and others, particularly through the inevitable ebb and flow of cognitive abilities we all experience. I’ll continue to try to smooth out the rough patches, both my own and others’ when I notice them. Compassion is often hardest to practice on ourselves, as we have access to the madness of our internal monologue. If we can learn to speak kindly to ourselves in moments of struggle, setting clear boundaries and gently adjusting expectations, we can model these behaviours to our colleagues, and extend genuine compassion, making it a natural habit rather than an occasional act.