Oh man, yes! The blank page is the real killer, not any of the rules people complain about. I go to a group in my town and we spend the first ten minutes just staring at our notebooks like the paper owes us money. What finally helped us was doing a quick warm up where everyone writes one bad sentence on purpose, and somehow that gets the words moving. It sounds silly but it works way better than waiting for some perfect idea to show up.

The thing that gets me is how gradual it is. You do not wake up one day and think your coffee tastes bad, you just slowly get used to weaker cups over a couple weeks until that becomes your normal. By month six your taste buds have totally reset and you forget what a proper cup even tastes like. That is why the wife's comment was the thing that caught it, a fresh set of eyes on the grinds does what months of drinking the stuff never will. I started weighing out a small scoop right after every cleaning now and comparing it to a photo on my phone, sounds silly but it takes ten seconds. The real lesson here is that cleaning day is when mistakes happen, not brewing day, so that is when you need to double check everything before you put it back together.