I became sick on Tuesday night, up at 2am, thinking it was the same old same old, the stomach issues I’ve had since childhood, brought on by stress or hormones or stray grains of wheat lodged in my gut. Usually a double-dose of ibuprofen knocks out the pain. Not this time. I’ll spare you the details, but it appears I had the norovirus, which mainly just made me feel absolutely terrible without any way to fix it.

It also brought me 24 hours of glorious quiet. Without the patience or ability to focus (on the news, on social media, on books, on myself), all I had was the sweetness of extended quiet suffering, falling in and out of fitful sleep punctuated by the occasional irritation of retching (thank you, husband, for attending to my retching bowl). Unable to make conversation, I was given a pass on interaction. Even the cats avoided me until I became semi-upright about twelve hours in.

My phone was on another floor, so the never-ending buzz of texts and spam voicemail notifications were silenced. My Apple Watch lay on its charger, its haptics and constant measurement of my movements on pause. When I did flip open my laptop, the stream of information overwhelmed me. News, Facebook (ugh), Instagram, Bluesky (a different kind of ugh), all designed to interrupt, to distract, to work on the most basic of emotions. No wonder my thinking process is so disjointed. The mind needs time to be free. The writing mind. The emotional mind. The connected mind.

I’m making a commitment to writing something messy and of the moment in this blog on the regular (what does on the regular mean? More than once a week. I could be ambitious and try writing daily, but I don’t want to feel trapped by it). It’s been a year since I last wrote. I doubt anyone is reading or eagerly awaiting my deep thoughts. But I have to get back into this process again. I have to get the words flowing. So much goes on in this mind of mine, when I let it go free, that I would like to get onto the screen. Even if no one reads it.

And these are very sad, disconnected, interrupted, overwhelming times. There are many ways to fight tyranny, to say free inside your mind, to be in community with others. So, Internet Void, there you have it. I’m going to write like it’s two thousand and five. Low expectations, high word count, here for no one but me. Let’s just hope I’m not feeding AI.