me and my necrotic brain

So apparently I forgot to tell anyone I was getting married, and now everyone's kind of pissed at me. I'm going to have to beg for a little forgiveness here, because to be perfectly honest I'd sort of forgotten about it myself. On the actual date I had to be reminded something like five times that that was the day: I had to be told, be at such-and-such a place at 2 pm; etc. etc. Those things can be managed because I have attentive and caring family and friends who make sure I'm at the right place at the appointed hour. If it were just me, well, there'd be even more people ticked off at me right now than there already are.

So I've been thinking about a couple of things related to this little lapse and the fragility of memory in general: the first is about writing, which records things for you, orders them, and makes sense of them. That's why I like writing so much. What no one sees, though, is how much time I spend revising--going back over things, thinking to myself, "Well, but that doesn't make sense now, does it? What happened in between that got me from point A to point B?" In writing I make the connections that are sometimes missing in my moment-to-moment experience of life. And sometimes I have to ask people to fill in the gaps for me when I can't remember the particulars myself.

But the other thing about writing--and this writing here in my blog, particularly--is that it probably makes me sound a little more on top of things mentally than I actually am. I look pretty normal again (which means I look like a normal human being, although I don't look at all like myself), and I sound normal when I write. It's in the actual living experience of me that one realizes I am not yet the same. And even then I have to remind people of what I can and can't do all the time: I can't take crowds, because they disorient me; there are certain environments I can't navigate for the same reasons, including restaurants and grocery stores. Since I'm walking around and talking (and generally doing a pretty good "fake"), people tend to think I can do those other things, too, and they get frustrated when I have to insist, say, that "just stopping for this one errand along the way" will only work for me if I can wait in the car. There seems to be something about brain function that helps you sort things out when a lot of stuff is going on around you, and in my case, that function has not yet returned.

So that's my day-to-day reality. In the mean time, I piece things together by writing, and I make sense of everything there, in the aftermath of the actual event. The solitary experience is the one that works for me.

It's like my brain has become my own book to read and analyze.