“The yips”: You’re an expert at some precise physical movement — swinging a golf club, say — and one day, your muscles rebel. You go to do a thing you’ve done a million times before, and your hand jerks — against your will — and you whiff it.

“The twisties”: You’re a gymnist, flying and twisting through the air, and you have an innate sense of where you are irrespective of the sense of gravity (which you can barely feel) or what your inner ear tells you (bc it’s fucking confused), because you have to have it. Until one day, you don’t. You’re in the middle of a spin and you… lose track of the ground.

“Lost Skill Syndrome”: You’re an expert, you’ve practiced, you’ve performed, and then one day you wake up and… just can’t do the thing. Like you never learned it in the first place. Only now you’re not just a beginner, you’re an anxious and worried beginner.

I’ve learned these terms since Simone Biles famously stepped down from the team competition at the Tokyo 2021 Summer Olympics. She had the twisties. She lost her sense of where she was during a vault. She could’ve died if she kept competing.

And I find it all too relatable.

I’ve never been good at locating myself in space; I can’t play instruments, I quit wood turning because I yipped and nearly got a bowl gauge to the face. I had no trust in my ability to get the angle of the gauge just so. I couldn’t feel it.

But the chaos and trauma of the last 18 months gave me the mental version of these physical syndromes. I’ll get better, and I’ll get worse again. It’s really tough and it sucks. But it’s nice to have a word for it.