The brain is back. As much as it ever was, anyway, which is good news for me, out here alone in the short branches of the wild west. It's good to have a brain that works when SUVs are coming at me at 50 mph. Last week my brain hiccupped in a weird new way but according to Dr. Google, it is unlikely to happen again, and indeed, my memories are as intact as they were before the hiccup, which is to say, generally faded, tattered, and stored at the back of a dark, high shelf in a closet I rarely can find. All systems normal.
The names of new acquaintances flew past me into the ether. Phone numbers evaded my retrieval attempts. I started forgetting names of people I'd known from California, people I'd worked with. Whole portions of conversations went missing. Discussions and decisions were lost to vagueness.
I fought the encroachment of incompetence by denying reality. For years, I had prided myself on my near-eidetic memory. That marvelous (unearned) skill smoothed my path from kindergarten through college and beyond. I refused to believe it was starting to fail. Quelle horreur!
My inability to accept the changes in my brain produced some stinging defeats as I doubled down on defending my mistakes. The facts (which mattered back then, unlike now) always revealed my thinking errors. Go back and look at the minutes, Carol! We said this, not that! When it started to become a pattern, I had to accept the sad reality that something in my brain had changed.
Smack someone down often enough and sooner or later they catch on. Eventually I learned to stop claiming to be correct. Out of sheer grief at being betrayed by the brain I thought I could trust, I swung to the opposite extreme and made sure everyone knew my memories were mired in a wasteland far from any known landmarks.
My friends were sympathetic but impatient. They would only listen for so long before they were like, yeah, we get it, you're human, can we get back to the business at hand? With my family, when it emerged that Mom had dementia, I couldn't really get much mileage on the complaint engine. Yeah, poor Carol. Sad, but let's get back to poor old Mom! I couldn't compete. That was annoying. When I whined I can't remember, she would roll her eyes and laugh. As her brain deteriorated, though, she got more empathetic. Then I felt like a colossal cad for whining.
I learned to write everything down, a habit I employ to this day. If I didn't have Write blogpost on my calendar every Sunday afternoon, I would not be writing this blog post.
Last week my brain took a half-day holiday and opted not to make new memories for a few hours. Man, I wish I could just opt out and have someone else take the wheel for a while. The rest of my brain muddled through the afternoon, casting resentful glances at the empty spaces the AWOL neurons had left behind. These slackers didn't tell anyone that they were leaving or where they were going or when they would be back, so the rest of us had to soldier on, moving from moment to moment with no breadcrumb leading back to where we'd been. It's definitely a surreal way to experience reality. A taste of what is to come, perhaps.
After lunch, the delinquent neurons came back online and were like, What's up, dudes? Oh, sorry, did we lock you out of the memory palace? Whoops, our bad.
Those slackers. I'd like to write them up or something. Maybe tomorrow, if I remember.
