Lost my words

Usually, I’m verbose, complicated, oversharing, somewhat competent. 😉

Tonight, I am not.  Well, maybe I’ll overshare, but I don’t feel at all competent. 🙂

Although I just got home from work, my brain gave out a long time ago.  I’m relying on my mobile’s auto-suggest feature to an extent that is sharply noticeable for me.  I’m typing gibberish, hoping it can read my mind, so that all I have to do is point and grunt. 🙂

Because that’s what I’m doing tonight: pointing.  Agreeing with that which is pre-suggested.  My tag line: “Yeah–that.”

My words are almost gone.  What’s left feels blocky, pixelated, like early episodes of cartoons like The Simpsons.

I can still think, somewhat, because for me, thought and speech/verbiage are not necessarily intertwined.  My thought-trains are running with little hiccup, and they’re even somewhat on schedule.  But trying to express those thoughts to someone else is frustrating.

I think this is because verbal expression requires that I go through several steps, each with their own obstacles:

• Gather my nebula of thought into a more-condensed, concentrated cloud.
• Try to find the right, accurate words for those thoughts.
• Assemble them into a sentence structure.
• Make the right motor movements to say them.

This may be easy for some, and it usually is for me, too.

But not today, not now.

I’m not sure how it happened, or why.  It just did.  It happened suddenly, too.  Boom–just like that.

I tried to trace it back.  Maybe it was due to the emotional upheaval this week has brought me, and I’m finally reaching my Fatigue Point, one that I can no longer ignore.

Maybe it’s because my high-thyroid elderly cat with the insatiable appetite woke me up out of a sound sleep, meowing, loudly, as though he were in pain, which is his new ploy to get attention–and get fed (for literally the fifth time that night) the food he likes better than that which we leave out overnight.

Maybe it’s the exhaustion that comes over me at random.

Or the nap I took on my desk, from which I woke up sort of staggering.

This might not be the best time to be writing a blog post for the world to see.  I’m in the throes of trying to hang onto my words, after all.

I’m liable to make errors.  I feel verbally clumsy, blocky, top-heavy, and unsophisticated.  Even under the gentle guidance of my mobile’s auto-suggest feature, I may begin to type erroneously and then select the wrong suggested word.

But it might be good to do exactly what I’m doing.  To show that not every post is “polished”.  To show the not-so-prepared, unedited side.  To reveal my deepest secret: my humanness.  My clumsy-by-nature humanness.

It’s not exactly easy to reveal.  It’s easy to tackle the tough, taboo topics like stimming, sexuality, and so on, when I’ve had a million chances to polish it up and prime it for public view and consumption.  (Not that I’m perfect at that, either; it’s not like I’m god(dess)’s gift to blogging or anything.  It’s just that, naturally, I tend to write on Good Brain Days, and alas, this is not one of them.)

See?  Even my thoughts are clunky.  I’m probably saying all kinds of wrong things and giving all kinds of wrong impressions right now.

I really should know when to say when and hang it up for the night.

But I have this morbid desire to keep sharing, even during unflattering moments.  And it helps that I can do this while remaining utterly silent (save for the occasional cussing out of technology and my equally-uncoordinated fingers).

Blogging in the middle of a word-loss also helps me reorganize my thoughts into something linear, preventing an episode of shutdown.

Some people might say, “Bullshizz.  She hasn’t lost her words!  If she really had, then she wouldn’t be able to type this post!”

I understand.

There’s another side of this attempt that remains invisible: the sheer effort it takes to do this. The cognitive resources involved in trying to sound coherent.  And the amount of time it’s taking, when I have to stop in the middle of practically every sentence to think of how I should say something in a way that makes sense.

And those people didn’t see me at the office a short while ago.  They didn’t see me stumble on a word I was trying to search my mind for, a frustrating attempt that resulted in my having to look it up in an online thesaurus.  Four entries later, I still hadn’t found the word I (thought I?) was looking for, so I resigned myself to the next best choice.

Those people didn’t see me start a sentence, break it off suddenly to back up and rephrase, stammer and stutter and slur my speech, which came out too loud and too klutzy.  Almost too juvenile, as if I was a small child, trying to express myself but too overtired (something I can’t always feel/sense) to do so.

(No, this is not shaming or the indulgence in age-related function labels; everyone pretty much knows by now that I don’t roll like that.  It’s just neutral, non-judgmental, matter-of-fact, the situation as I experience it.)

It just is what it is.

It’ll be over soon.

Listening to music on the way home from work helped.  I cranked the tunes.  I think what it does is recalibrate my brain, set it to a tempo.  And the lyrics–if there are any–help, too, in that they help me maintain sentence structure by giving me examples of coherent and poetic speech, set to that rhythm.  It may not work for everyone, but I get some decent mileage out of it.

Well, now that I’m home and I’ve revealed my realness in a pretty authentic state, live as it was happening, I think I can finally rest. 🙂

This is what I usually feel like, in terms of how I can usually express myself:

…compared to what my self-expression feels like when I’m on the verge of losing my words:

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