Dry as a bone

If you're a World Anvil Pro and you've clicked on this link, you're going to be sorely disappointed with this. No fiction, no art, and possibly even no world-building. Just... a sickly person trying to keep up with a challenge. I did about the same thing yesterday, where I just blogged about the experience of world-building rather than presenting any stories.
Today I'm dry. The cold has fully settled in over night and trashed my birthday weekend. I'm supposed to be writing prompts, prepping for Nanowrimo, keeping up with all my other plans, reading books... learning Narratology. Instead, I've been coughing up half a lung every five minutes.
I wish I could say "And this got me thinking about dryness in the context of Amnar..." but I haven't. I've been creatively dry, which is a pretty scary situation to be in. Some of the dryness is a result of being sick, but there's also the constant threat of burnout. I have very few physical and mental spell slots to manage day-to-day life, and I wanted to spend most of the weekend with my partner, because we haven't had much time together recently.
All of this crushes down the time I have to be creative. That can be great, because it's an added constraint. But it's actually proved to be so little time I run out of energy. I'm still working on this. There has to be some way to write, earn money, have a relationship, and be autistic without actually collapsing completely.
So, what did I do this weekend birthday-wise? Well, since it's been dry, we went out for lunch and sat outside. The world's weather is so strange that we have July weather in October, with bright sunshine and high blue skies. No rain. My partner comments on how nice this it, but it's also a horror story, something strange happening to the world that we only see in the lack of rain.
We sat in a pub garden, and it was bliss to be away from the noise and the fuss of the restaurant. I hadn't realise how hard it is to sit, surrounded by talking, music, tables, colour, pachinkos, children, adults, all contained within several hard walls. I'm only learning, eighteen months post-diagnosis, how the sensory world has been hurting me so much all these years.
We sat and watched a toddler attempting to establish good diplomatic relations with a large black dog. We talked about life, relationships, and what autistic people like me might want to do for a birthday. I used to think I had to do what other people did.
I feel like an alien visiting from another planet. I study all the humans around me, and my teenage studies informed me that I was supposed to spend birthdays with these people called friends. We'd all get drunk and then somehow this would make me happy. Or fulfilled, or something.
I tried that, for a number of years. Until I realised that the drinking was so self-destructive I had to give up. I went dry. For a few years, I tried doing activities that I felt like doing. We did the Warner Brothers Studio Tour one year and another year we went to a safari park. One year we visited a medieval library.
Last year, I didn't do anything. My brother in-law turned 50 last year, so he had a big bash which somewhat swamped my own birthday, which was literally two days after the party. Secretly, I was quite relieved I didn't have to think of something to do, and could just dig back into PhD thesis revisions and teaching.
This year, I have a cold. A dry cough. A dry throat, dry eyes, dry everything. This briefly gave me an idea to write something about people lost out in the desert being dry and being unable to find water. But there's something about being ill and being autistic and chronically ill that does decimate your ability to get beyond the first few words.
My brain is squishy and dry, so I'm going to leave doing proper prompt responses, perhaps as I head toward the end of the month and my partner is away for his various, more exciting adventures.
If I was healthy and struggling to do the prompts, I'd probably free-write until I came up with something. But because I'm also sick, I'm not going to even attempt to do that. I gave it a go last night, but it... didn't go well. I gave up. I was too tired to focus and the cold was really starting to bite. Fingers crossed I can get back to creative prompts next week.