WIP Wednesday
Overused, but runs off the tongue nicely.
I have a lot of WIPs on my desk. Not including myself. Wednesday also happens to be the day my steroid dose goes down by 5mg. And each Wednesday I hope for the side-effects to ease off a bit. It hasn’t happened yet, and I have become intimately familiar with my itchy skeleton. I wrestle with my brain and my need to keep moving. My brain wants to zone out but the skeleton needs to be doing something. And this brings me to why I have a lot of WIPs on my desk.
Muscle weakness is another steroid side-effect. And that screwed me over for the first few weeks of my highest dose. I couldn’t hold a paint brush, or manipulate any clay. But bizarrely my brain was firing on all cylinders. I couldn’t win.
So I have a Brain Book. A Leuchturm1917 that I brain-fart in. Ideas, techniques, things I see, all go in to the book. I have three tabletop RPG game ideas in there. Plans for videos which will never see the light of day, but are stories I want to tell. Concepts for artwork. Shopping lists. Dates from phonecalls.
I’m not adding any aesthetic photos of it. Because it is private. Not in a diary way. But thought processes, old ideas, and scribbled out ideas are private. The journey to them. Or indeed the cul-de-sac with no space to turn around.
A lot of my ideas are like that moment you realise you’ve walked the wrong way and have to do that awkward turn-around in public.
One idea in it, which comes up again and again for me, is a VLOG. I’ve been playing around with Reels recently and enjoying the process of filming and editing. I know I have the capability to make a horizontal video. But I am starting to see my brain go back to pre-steroid exhaustion. Which is breaking my heart.
I had hung my hope on this last hospital stay and diagnosis knocking the exhaustion issue on its arse. But my (more agressive) immunotherapy kicks off in the new year. Maybe 2026 will see a VLOG kick off?