The Destructive Nature of Gluten Sensitivity on Writers

Since the 90s, there has been a growing pile of facts and statistics on the detrimental effects of gluten on the human body.

For some, Celiac disease can be quite crippling. For others like myself, with just gluten sensitivity, it can still lose you a day or two of productivity, especially when it creeps up on you when you least expect it.

Like today.

Loss of Focus

I had put aside my whole Tuesday to sit and do another 7 hours of writing, but I could not, for the life of me, focus on anything. Words were blurred, sentences couldn’t come together. I even found myself forgetting simple things like boiling the kettle then not making the coffee. Or making myself a second breakfast.

It took me awhile, the coffee helped, but I remembered that over the past few days I’d had a few things that had had gluten in them. I can have a little every now and then, but if I do it three days in a row I get gluten overload. And today, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.

Cleaning

It took about 24 hours of not eating anything gluten related before my brain began to recover. It meant that I could finally type at least a blog post at 11pm. (This one!)

On the plus side, when I can’t think due to gluten sensitivity, I just go into cleaning mode. The sinks, dishes, toilet, bed and carpet got a bit of a work out today!

Now, if I did brick laying, or gardening or something else that can rely on muscle memory to be completed without too much focus, gluten probably wouldn’t bother me so much. It’s why there are so many people in the world who still deny that wheat based food can be bad for you. If it doesn’t affect the majority of the population, how important could it be?

Writing

But writing something where you need to make sure that a) the words are in the right order b) the punctuation is correct c) the words convey a meaning and d) there is some underlying thought under them on another level, well, gluten in your digestive tract might mean you’re just not going to be able to get past the ‘wut r wordz’ stage!

As I also do some casual teaching so that I can pay the rent, if the gluten effect was going to creep up on me like today when I least expected it, I’d probably lose my students. Gluten = ‘Er, Dunno’ ‘Er, sorry, can’t answer that. ‘Er, let’s talk about that another time.’ Lucky I lesson-plan within an inch of my life so that I can push through these situations with a ‘let’s just go on with this and get back to that another time’ system. Otherwise, I’d probably look like a blathering idiot. (Or maybe I always do, and the students are just polite!)

Confused

Now, I don’t know what level gluten really is a killer for other writers, but with something as complicated as a multiple time zone time travel story that I’m writing now, with about 10 different main characters and another 10 sub characters, all with their own motives, I think the gluten effect is just going to shut me down on the first paragraph. Sometimes, when it hits, I’ll read over something I’d written the day before and just not be able to make sense of any of it to be able to build anything further.

Thankfully, avoiding gluten is a lot easier these days, and I know how to deal with it. If you’ve always had trouble focusing on writing, why not try removing gluten from your diet for a week and see what happens? If it is not that, maybe it’s something else. Try changing your diet and see what works for you.

So, my focus is back, and I can finally get started on my novel. Yay!

Oh, wait, is it bed time already?