For the last 1,5 weeks I was down with the worst case of conjunctivitis I ever had. The pain in my left way could be compared to the dull, throbbing pain of a toothache, always slowly ebbing away and then intensifying again, keeping me awake most of the night. I spent the days in my darkened room, listening to audiobooks and pressing a cold towel on my face, cursing myself for not being able to do anything then lay there and wait for the antibiotics to work. I cursed myself because I realised of how much I depend on working online – at my 9-5 and else. Since I started writing more seriously, I have established at least one habit: to write every day. If not writing a blog post here, I’d at least scribble down something in my trusted Moleskine. And I couldn’t do that with the eye. All those strange thoughts and fractions of stories/articles/whatever, I could not write them down, so they trickled away again into my subconsciousness without ensuring me the Nobel Prize for literature. When I write, I just jot down the words as they come, sorting, reviewing and editing myself later. And I. Could. Not. Do. It.

Sample picture, by Lone Primate

Fittingly, I had read an article about the deaf and blind (!) author Helen Keller the week before, which made me also think about French author Jean-Dominique Bauby, who wrote an entire book with his eyelid, dictating one letter at a time. And compared to how these people worked and conducted whole books in their head before getting the words out, maybe I should stop moaning and be happy that I can type on the keyboard of my trusted Macbook again without crying.