Or do I have a head injury?

[resonant]

You know, the longer I spend in post-menopausal word loss --

"if you don't live in a country with an active -- aw, hell, I've lost the word -- not royalty, not monarchy, not oligarchy, the thing where some people have better blood than other people --"

"Aristocracy?"

"Thank you!"

-- the more familiar it looks to me when Ray Kowalski says "the Northwest Areas" or starts the Miranda statement and then loses his place and trails off.

(Due South content in 2022 is thanks to fox, who KNOWS WHY.)

Comments

[fox]

WAITAMINUTE does that happen in menopause too? I've like only just recovered from pregnancy-and-early-childhood mom-brain.

[resonant]

Yes, it does, and it sucks. But it happens to the spouse, too, so some of it may be just simple age and not menopause at all.

Someone on Table Talk once said she forgot the word "refrigerator" when her baby was small, and said, "You know, the big white box with the cold food in it."

[mekare]

Whoops meant to reply to fox. Sorry.

[china_shop]

But it happens to the spouse, too, so some of it may be just simple age and not menopause at all.

Randomly, in Korean there are two words for menopause: one specifically for woman (or people in female bodies?) and one that's gender neutral.

[resonant]

Interesting. Is Korean more gendered, like Spanish? Or is it just that specific word, like in English "top" and "blouse" imply feminine while "shirt" is neutral?

[china_shop]

Korean is rarely gendered. I think it's more like blouse and shirt. My dictionary also translates one of them as climacterium, which is a word I haven't come across before that should maybe get wider use. ;-)

[isis]

I have been doing this (and, oddly, 'refrigerator' is one of the words frequently subject to this temporary word-loss) ever since well before menopause. My husband marvels that I am a killer crossword solver and yet forget ordinary words fairly often.

[resonant]

I lose "aristocracy" quite a lot, and also, ironically, "articulate."

[rydra_wong]

It also happens as a result of some meds -- SSRIs can do it a bit, but anything that's an anticonvulsant will really eat memory.

One of my meds is an anticonvulsant (being used for anti-anxiety/augmenting antidepressants), so I am VERY familiar with this effect.

(First time I was put on it, I woke up the next morning and had a panic attack because I realized I couldn't remember the name of the drug I was on.)

I should be hitting menopause in the next several years, so I'm rather grimly contemplating what it'll be like with menopausal fuckery stacked on top, and whether being used to working around it already gives me an edge, or whether I'll have no short-term memory or ability to put a sentence together at all.

[resonant]

I would think that having some practice would help!

[mekare]

>>pregnancy-and-early-childhood mom-brain.

*high five* though I haven‘t recovered completely yet...

[luzula]

Now I'm picturing a story with the tag "Post-Menopausal Ray Kowalski"...

[resonant]

It crossed my mind!

[ride_4ever]

Or should that be "Post-MANopausal Ray Kowalski"? LOL.

[fox]

Incidentally my favorite "or do I have a head injury?" take was something by (I'm almost positive) laurajv in which he did in fact have a head injury. Stella made a comment about his having aphasia. I adored that. (I don't remember anything else about the story, I don't think, but what I adored was Laura's treating off-hand remarks as if they were just as true as . . . on-hand remarks. There was a Sentinel one of hers where Blair really did fly Apaches in Desert Storm. ~heart eyes~)

[resonant]

I remember that story, but I couldn't remember who wrote it.

And I just reread Dira's "Relax," where Ray really did (sort of) get abducted by aliens when he was ten.

[desireearmfeldt]

And doesn't Dira's hockey AU (Hawks and Hands) have hockey-player!Ray with the aftereffects of too many concussions, including word-retrieval?

[laurajv]

ohai

*hides face*

(eta: the one with the head injury was "Baresark": https://archiveofourown.org/works/775 )

[fox]

❤️

[jesse_the_k]

and it's brilliant! I can hear every word of your Ray saying:

I dug with words which as anyone knows are not my best friends, and I dug with yelling at him every chance he gave me which was a lot, and finally I dug with my fist. Bam! Just like that.

[mekare]

Ha, I have the same problem since the birth of my first. At first I thought it was due to loss if sleep but that is something we got a lot better at by now. It doesn‘t help that it happens in both languages I speak ugh.

[resonant]

I think it took me a couple of years after the kidlet was born before my vocabulary came all the way back. (And of course once you have a kid your life rarely allows you to pay attention to one thing at a time; I'm still fighting that, and the kidlet is 23 and doesn't even live here.)

[china_shop]

Ha, I used to love writing Kowalski because my brain works like that by default -- I just had to turn off the bit that corrects it.

the thing where some people have better blood than other people --

<3 <3 <3

[resonant]

The character who was like that for me was Rodney McKay. So easy to write his dialog - it was the voice I heard in my head all the time going "You're wasting my TI-ime."

[china_shop]

Hee! ❤

[laurajv]

I once wrote a story where Ray specifically had anomic aphasia, and yes, it is more and more understandable the older I get.

[resonant]

It's time to reread all the old classics.

[lexin]

I've had word loss since I was 20. I put it down to being at university and being under stress while taking exams. It's really simple things I forget - the first one was 'mushrooms' and I remember being in a shop and pointing at them saying, "Those white things, there." Of course that was in the days when there were greengrocers.

[resonant]

I can definitely see a difference depending on how much sleep I get, but there's a baseline level of word access difficulty that never goes away. The writing I do for work rarely demands a novel word, but in what little personal writing I do, I'm often putting placeholders - "like a [star, planet, thingy]" - because usually the next time around it comes back to me.

[nestra]

It's happening to me either because of perimenopause or migraines or pandemic or whatever, which is VERY INCONVENIENT when I am supposed to remember words and write them for a living.

[resonant]

It's SO inconvenient, and brings a conversation to a screeching halt, and is especially frustrating when you pride yourself on having just the right word.

[panisdead]

SO familiar. I usually get stuck repeating the word right before the lost word, or else, "Uh, uh, uh, uh--" which people interpret as stuttering. (Fair).

[resonant]

Many years ago I had a coworker whose unbeatable Pictionary strategy was just to throw out approximately correct words at a high speed until she hit the right one by accident. "It's a line, it's a line, it's a square, it's a rectangle, it's a rectangle with a leg, it's a flag! It's a flag on a curve, on a car, it's a parade, it's a motorcade!" and everybody groans because she's just solved "motorcade" in less than a minute.

Anyway, I'm trying to train myself to do something similar - talk all around the word I can't remember instead of silently grabbing for it as it gets more and more elusive.

[ellen_fremedon]

*sad fistbump*

Yyyep. I've been having this, too.

I'm still technically perimenopausal--I haven't had a period since August, but it's not official until it's been a year, but I'm pretty sure this is it--and ever since I stopped menstruating, whatever neuroatypicality I've got has become much more difficult to mask or ignore. It's not just the nominal aphasia, it's everything.

(I will say, writing Victor Hugo fanfic has been helping out a lot, I suppose because it keeps ALL of the words in regular rotation. All the words. All of them. Every single fucking word, and all of them twice when I let Grantaire talk.)

[resonant]

I love the idea of Hugo fans keeping all the words in constant circulation!

[sineala]

Due South has been on my mind lately. Someone I don't know sent me a Tumblr ask yesterday wondering why Canadian Shack was a popular fandom trope; I don't know if they just expected me to empathize with their bewilderment or what but I think they were a little surprised when I was like "Okay, everybody gather round and let me tell you about fannish reactions to the series finale of Due South!"

Forgetting words is the WORST. *sad fistbump* Last year I had an episode of stress-induced aphasia with some word-finding problems and the weirdest thing about it was that I wasn't scared because I literally couldn't form thoughts into scary words and the most I was able to come up with for about five hours to describe the experience was "I feel... (ten second pause) bad. In my head."

[resonant]

That sounds terrifying. Did it feel strange to come out of it, or was it more like you took a nap and when you woke up Santa had brought your vocabulary back?

I saw that tumblr post about the Canadian shacks. I was annoyed (though not surprised) to see one more example of someone on the internet who can't say a neutral "what's the story with this strange thing" but instead has to go straight to "can you believe this obvious disrespect for me and all I stand for?!"

[sineala]

Wow, that post sure has way more notes than when I posted it. Oof.

The aphasia only lasted a few hours and I was slowly getting my vocabulary back for the last couple hours so it was very gradual until the last couple minutes when suddenly I had words. My wife had taken me to the ER and I kept wanting to go home; I knew something was wrong with me, but since I was basically feeling zero fear about it I couldn't really correctly judge whether or not it was serious since if it was serious surely I would be afraid of this.

[twistedchick]

It's a noun thing, very rarely a verb thing. I can be talking to the SU about someone, visualize their face, and forget their name. Or I can remember the entire plot of a book or movie and forget either the title or the author. It's *there* in the brain, but just out of reach. Someone medical told me it had to do with hormone changes at menopause, and I believe them, because it never happened to me before that. Oddly enough, it does not seem to work in retrospect; I remember a lot of old family stories and family history with all the names and a reasonable sense of the dates, but more modern things are harder.

[resonant]

I think mine is nouns too - will have to watch for that. If I remember.

I wonder if the family stories thing is similar to the way people can lose word access (this happened to a friend of mine who had a stroke) but still retain the full lyrics to hundreds of songs.

[ride_4ever]

And while we're at it about fic with Ray's head injuries and aphasia: "Finding the Words" by Berty.

[resonant]

Yay!

[azurelunatic]

I'm very annoyed when I think I have the correct letter to be searching under, but then thirty seconds later it turns out that letter was extremely wrong.

[resonant]

I don't know which is worse -- when you're very sure you want a short word that starts with L, and eventually you find the word you wanted, and it was "aquatic," or when you can talk all around it and come up with three thousand words that are almost but not quite exactly the same.

[fox]

Meanwhile, in a random conversation with Himself about the different lengths of generations in our respective families of origin ultimately meaning his grandparents were close to 20 years older than my grandparents, the sentence that left my mouth was "You're a few olders than I am." So that's a thing now.

[resonant]

Love it! Most of our family phrases like that come from when the kidlet was trying to express ideas that were above their lexile framework, like "the heavy hot worm" for the microwaveable foot-warmer.

[fox]

When my kid was smaller he substituted /k/ for /p/ in a lot of cases, which I never really understood (like, there was a kid down the street named Preston whom my kid called Kreston) - but sometimes it made better sense than the truth, such as when I said “polar bear” and he repeated “colder bear” and now his father and I seldom call those creatures anything else.

[nnozomi]

...oh good, it's not just me.
Like some other people around here, because my personal and professional lives both straddle two languages, I get to forget twice as many words, aren't I lucky. I have a feeling that assuming I live old, I will end up only able to communicate in a jumble of (at least) two different languages, so anybody who wants to talk to me at that point will have to speak both of them...

[resonant]

When you forget the word, can you fill in the word in the other language? -- or do you forget them both?

[nnozomi]

When you forget the word, can you fill in the word in the other language? -- or do you forget them both?

It varies! Sometimes I can come up with the word I want in one language, not necessarily the relevant one for the moment, and sometimes neither of them come to mind. ("Can you get the, you know, the soup server thing?" when what I want to say is either "ladle" or "o-tama" but I can't bring to mind either one...)