The thing is, I started off the year in a really shitty place mentally, before the lockdowns even started. January is usually my bounce back month; after the slog of the holiday season consuming my time and energy in Nov and Dec, Jan is when I can start getting some energy back with lighter workloads and less hours. Instead, I ended up with carpal tunnel, and that compounded with my other problems, I dunno, it really fucked with my head. I've largely managed to mitigate the symptoms since (barring occasional flare ups), but I was in a bad way for the first two months of 2020 already. Then, right as I start kinda of shaking it, COVID hit, the lockdowns started, and I think the bad vibes all around just didn't let me get better. By March, I just said fuck it, and took the rest of the year off worrying about projects. I did do a little bit of stuff, in fact, I did a weekly podcast with web serial folks for three months before returning to work crashed it, but otherwise, productivity just sucked.
But yeah, I wasn't alone in that regard, a lot of people had a bad time creatively... except, like, a whole cluster of my peers in a certain field, who just powered right along, knocking shit out of the park while I floundered, so that wasn't a great feeling either when I got back to the keyboard. Like, you know, happy for them, but just made it all the more easy to be self-disparaging, which is a bad trap to fall into when trying to rev back up into the action.