**WHEW** Art, your post comes really close to the bone.

   I didn't think I would get this confessional, but if this will help you, here goes. I have just come out of a prolonged period ~3 yrs more or less~ where I couldn't play or sing or listen to music at all. Admittedly this was a period when I went through problems with ills and ailments.

   But the two were not obviously connected...it was more a severe musical depression. I didn't like the stuff, didn't want to be around it. This, from somebody who started pickin' at age 9 and couldn't stay away from it for 50+ years, was shocking. So shocking I didn't even want to inquire into it too deeply. All I knew was that, if I never played or heard music again in my life, that was how it would have to be.

   Then, glorious fun, I started again. Very gingerly. Putting together a songbook was what got me back my insatiable curiosity. The songbook turned into a full-fledged re-imagination of traditional music for me, and I must say posting and reading posts here at the DT have been part of the therapy.

   Oddly enough I never stopped writing songs. Not many (for formerly prolific me, who've written literally thousands)...a dozen or so per year...but they kept coming.

   I don't know if your inability stems from physical reasons but I know mine was mental... Thank goodness there's light at this end of the tunnel, even if possibly dimmer.

   If I can add a word of comfort, it''s this. I would enjoy and encourage your music at the level you can do it NOW, not THEN. We can't get back to THEN. I sure can't whip a banjo like I useter, nor do all those fancy things on the guitar either. For one thing, without any specific deficits in the fingers, it took a certain energy level that is diminished now.

   BUT...and it's a very big but...I have seen oldtimers make music that's very little in the performance and very much in the spirit. Balus and Abigail Ritchie. A deaf man named Abner Keesee in Virginia I will never forget, whose singing was a tuneless roar that made the two songs he sang me into masterpieces of strangeness. Crockett Ward who could no longer hear his fiddle going slightly out of tune. Not to mention numerous people who never had much technical facility. And I know it is the singer and the song and the player even if sloppy and technically flaky.

   Art, don't give it up. You're one of the good ones.

   Best wishes ever, Bob