For the last two months, I've been in various countries on the other side of the world. My first major trip (not counting teenage years when I had parents or teachers looking after me), I launched myself into freezing (and well below) temps, countries in terrible recessions, countries that didn't speak my language and people whose culture I (still, after two trips there) don't understand.  I had naive ideas about what I'd be capable of on that trip. Not in terms of the trip itself - I exceeded my own expectations, there - but rather more ordinary tasks.

I thought I'd be writing thousands of words.

It was all planned in my mind - I'd go out during the day, see things and wander around and then in the evenings, when there was nothing to do after dinner was made, I'd write. It made perfect sense. There was no one with me to talk to (I was travelling alone, with an imaginary husband always meeting me in the next city, or back at the hostel, depending on who I was talking to - and I was glad of that subterfuge several times) or to insist we go out to dinner, and I've never been much of a night-life girl. (Though I did find my way to an Australian pub in London. There were two barmaids, two bouncers and two boozers: none of them Australian.)

What I didn't count on was how much brain power the trip alone would take. Discounting jetlag and the constant sleep deprivation, my brain was already over-committed just coping from being excised from its cosy little life and plonked into strange cities every week. Learning new streets, new currencies, where the equivalent of a supermarket was. New languages (though progressively less of each one as I went along). Searching in vain for dried apricots that weren't from Turkey (tasteless soggy things). Walking 12 to 18 kilometres a day because when you don't understand the language, public transport can get you really lost. Caring for frostbitten hands (oops).

I haven't written a word since I left.

Stories still came to mind - I have several ideas (though far less than would usually have accrued in two months), including one that fixed about 80% of the problems with my novel. I wrote those down. But not a single word of a draft.

There is only so much brain to go around, and when you give it major changes to cope with - changes in living arrangements, injury, major grief or loss - you have to allow for the fact that there's not as much computing power left over for what you usually use it for. I've been on overdrive for two months. I still haven't written, but I'm okay with that - my brain's been shoved back into daily-life reality and is now trying to work out what on earth just happened, and whether I imagined the last two months. It'll get there - probably sooner than later, as I'm having creativity-cravings. But it's an important lesson to keep in mind when major things are going on - give yourself a break. Permission not to write. Because stressing out over not writing is about the least helpful thing you can do for your brain at that time. 

Let it get on with coping, and then it'll let you get on with writing.