just the two of us / we can make it if we try.

you can stay indoors all day when the sun is out, and sometimes it's nice like a cool draught from a tranquil spring, but watch out because if you stay indoors for two days in a row while the sun is out you start doing odd gothic literature things, stalking the halls and passages and muttering to yourself and parting the blinds to gaze down at your neighbours with a haunted look before turning away to contemplate your mannequins #yourmannequins. three days and you're basically fucked. you have to throw a towel over your head to scurry as far as the store for milk and people jeer at you like frankenstein's monster.

my toxic writing trait is imagining the scene in my head in long, full cinematic detail and then writing: “they fought. it was intense.”

You understand that the point of writing papers isn’t just to have a paper with words on it, right? You understand that the entire point is to do the mental work necessary to put your learning into organized words, such that you actually learn it? And that if you outsource that to AI you are not learning?

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.