Lost For Words

 Have you ever been lost for words? Like really lost? I mean like you can't find the words you want to say, at all. After my accident, I lost a lot of my vocabulary. I also started having trouble completing thoughts during conversations. It has gotten a lot better over the years as I have relearned the words. In the beginning, I very often would start talking only to stop in the middle of a sentence because my mind suddenly went blank. I had literally lost my words. It is the strangest feeling in the world. Well, one of them anyway. My mind was actually blank. I didn't even have the words to say that I had no words. Imagine you are reading a book and the author just stopped in the middle of someone's dialogue. The page is empty after that. That is what happened to me. The only way out was for the other person to say something that I could respond to again.

I still have a lot of moments like that where the page goes blank, but now it usually only lasts a few moments until I actually get my own mind moving again. Usually I can't recall what I was going to say before the blank page effect hit, so I make up something to cover for it. People don't notice. They think I'm having the same problem as they usually have, forgetting a word. Of course I also have moments when I forget a word, or haven't relearned a word yet, and need to play a sort of guessing game with the other person until I get the right word, or something close enough. I cover those up too.

I look normal, I sound normal. I act normal. So people forget that I am not normal. It is tiring spending my day trying to figure out how to talk to people and get my message across. So I spend a lot of my time avoiding talking to people now. Wouldn't you?

Location: Canada

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