When I write, things line up.

Thoughts behave. Sentences do what they’re told. I can follow an idea from start to finish without losing it halfway through, like a sock in the wash.

When I work inside systems, things fall apart.

Not spectacularly. Not in a way that would justify concern or accommodation. Just quietly, repeatedly, and with enough consistency to be humiliating. I misread instructions I have definitely read before. I forget the steps I have already learned. I make errors that suggest I am either not paying attention or actively sabotaging myself.

Neither is true, but try explaining that to a portal.

This is the part that grates.

Everyone assumes repetition equals mastery. That once something has been explained, it should stick. That competence accumulates. That if you can follow one set of rules, you can follow another.

But the brain is not a filing cabinet. It is more like a browser with too many tabs open, one frozen, one playing sound you didn’t start, and at least two demanding a password you absolutely do not remember setting.

Writing offers feedback. Immediate, internal, tolerable feedback. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Bureaucratic work offers consequences. Corrections. Deadlines. Passive-aggressive emails. Systems that assume you are calm, rested, and in possession of a short-term memory that functions on demand.

So I move between fluency and clumsiness, depending entirely on context.

The worst part is not the mistake. It’s the repeat performance. Getting the same thing wrong again feels less like an error and more like evidence. Surely by now I should have learned this. Surely at some point the lesson embeds itself, and the mistake retires.

And so a particular kind of shame creeps in. Not ignorance, but unreliability. Not “I don’t understand,” but “I should know better.”

There is something especially awkward about being articulate and administratively hopeless at the same time. Language creates expectations. If you sound like you know what you’re doing, people assume you do. They do not separate verbal fluency from procedural competence. They assume carelessness, or worse, indifference.

Stress makes this worse. So does sustained uncertainty. Trauma, even the quiet kind, doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as brain fog, mis-sequencing, and dropped details. You are still upright, still working, still capable of being expected to perform. You just can’t be trusted to do it consistently.

Which is far more destabilising than being bad at something.

Because inconsistency corrodes self-trust. If you can be clear in one space and chaotic in another, you start to wonder which version is the accident. The one who can hold an argument, or the one who keeps submitting the wrong document.

The answer, unhelpfully, is both.

The page is forgiving. Life is not. On the page, I control the pace. I can stop, rethink, and edit. Systems are timed, logged, and remembered forever. Writing allows focus without interruption. Bureaucracy demands vigilance without meaning.

We treat administrative failures as moral issues. Laziness. Carelessness. Disrespect for the system. But often it’s simply a mismatch between how a mind works and how a system is designed.

Most systems reward linear thinkers with surplus cognitive capacity. They punish drift, overload, and deviation. They assume that many people still have reserves.

Especially now.Especially here.

Cognitive inconsistency is not a confession or a diagnosis. It’s a description. A brain performing unevenly under uneven conditions.

The woman who can track an idea and the woman who gets the process wrong are one and the same.

One just happens to be better suited to verbs than portals.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)