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.

[luzula]

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

[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~)

[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.

[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

[laurajv]

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

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.)

[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."

[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.

[ride_4ever]

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

[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.

[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.

[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...