When Words Escape

I'm writing a blog post today because I'm having another one of those days that is totally obscured by fog. It's an experience that is pretty new to me.

This happened for the first time when I took a pretty hefty migraine medicine a few years ago that seriously interfered with my neurons. I sat down to write and was completely unable to grasp at the words floating around in my brain. It was the strangest, most unnerving feeling. I was relieved when my thinking returned to normal a few days after stopping the medication.

These days it seems to happen again when I'm going through some bad days, usually when my doctor changes my supplements around. Case in point: in the last three days I just haven't been able to find the right word when I'm speaking or writing! I feel like I've aged forty years in just a few hours, probably due to some supplement changes late Thursday into Friday.

I take comfort for now in knowing that it's probably temporary, and that in a few days my full vocabulary will come back as I start to adjust. But I also feel a little unsteady when I think that as I get older, the temporariness may turn into permanence. That I may lose the ability to grasp for those words entirely, or for a long delay of time.

As a writer, obviously being able to find the right word is hugely important.

I remind myself that there are people like Toni Morrison (86) and Stephen King (70) who are still writing well into the winters of their lives. And I tell myself that even if I struggle as I get older, the words will eventually appear long enough for me to grab them. At least I sure hope so, because despite lots of attempts over the past decade, I feel like I haven't even started yet. I'm just about to start, really.

And I have more urgency now because I've been sobered by a lot of cancer surrounding me lately. Both with people I'm close to and with those who I know but am not particularly intimate with. And I've also recently passed a two year milestone for my own illness journey that may or may not have an eventual resolution.

The reality is that I'm running out of time.

And while I can say, oh that's silly, I still have plenty of time...none of us knows how much time we have left. We hope it's longer than just tomorrow, or just next year, or just ten years from now. And even if it is, so many times I hear people say they woke up to find time had just evaporated, and here they are nearing the end of the road.

And I guess now that I think about it, maybe it's better to write and leave holes for words than to not write at all. At least I produced one thing today. We'll see what the next few hours holds.