You know how you get a minor-ish injury, and you keep… poking at it a bit, to see if it still hurts? Check out the scab until it’s gone? Well, that’s a reasonably harmless exercise, starting with childhood and band-aids.
The mental version of the same thing, on the other hand, where you’ve passed that mid-point of life-expectancy or encountered a serious setback, and start testing yourself to see if you’re still “all there”… that’s not nearly as much fun.
I’m a black humor kind of gal, and I don’t really get the existential willies about physical setbacks or eventual death. I wrote off religious beliefs as a child on Occam’s Razor grounds and critiques of Genesis from an evolutionary perspective. (YMMV, of course.) Having survived cancer and chemo, I’m actually delighted to have ridden the recovery down to a massive lifetime weight loss that landed me at “normal” and probably the best health of my life. I feel great, below the neck, anyway.
But my particular ticking time bomb hits me in my sweet spot, my core identity as “really smart” (as in, educational testing, regional high scores, etc.) I got my first setback in this area when I bounced off my limits as a college freshman clearly not fated to challenge the real players in mathematics, but I shrugged and turned to other things, and was content, browsing on the glories of Western Civ. and playing/working with the nascent tech world for decades.
As many of us do, I entertain myself with online games, esp. bare fundamental ones, like Sudoku, that have a strong analysis component. And since you can do things like set difficulty levels, it lends itself to numerical analysis, as in “how am I doing?”
And the answer is, not so good. There’s Alzheimer’s-type bad news all over my father’s family, and I’ve just gone thru the “cognitive impairment” tests that can be shockers when they zero in on performance. I initiated this prompted by declining level scores for games, a recognition that reading vocal music at tempo for performance was becoming more difficult, and other very specific short-term memory observations I was making in my daily life.
Sorry for the TMI, and I’m still the black humor gal that can but roll her eyes and continue, so, since no one gets out of here alive, and there’s not much that can be done anyway, I’m not looking for sympathy. But in my cold-blooded way I have observations about the impact of such stuff on writing that I wanted to share.
My habits have to change. I have to stop playing the sorts of measurement games I used as challenges with the excuse of improving my performance with practice. I can no longer expect to “get better” at some random form of raw no-effort analysis, the way I used to. That unearned freebie of the genetic dice is on its way out. Now the results are just depressing, and bad for my mood. Time to stop.
Like any limitation, I have to work with it. Short term memory gets used for “here’s item 1 and here’s item 2 and … wait a sec… how are they related to each other and what was my question when I started?” Effectively, my thinking’s not impaired, and the temporary scramble for the right word which I know exists is something I can work with (online synonyms, for example), but my short-term memory issues will encourage unintentional repeated words in writing (which I can catch with online editors). And above all, the whole thing is frustrating, full of false starts and repeated attempts, aided by scribbling bits down on paper, for simple tasks.
But everything else I use for writing seems to be unimpaired. So far. Progression unknowable.
I had hoped to avoid intellectual senescence all the way to the end, but that seems not to be an option.
So, what can I do? I can tool up. I have to do that anyway in the larger sense since I do all the bookkeeping for the family unit and this is the year when I am going to have to spell out the “how to get things done if you live longer than me” for my husband, made more urgent by needing to get that written for my own use first, while I still can. This will force a great simplification and automation of systems where possible, over the course of the next couple of years.
But in the meantime, I can still tell stories. I’ll be doing that for years yet — I’m sure of it. And it gives me great pleasure. If I do it well enough, it will bring pleasure to others, too. And one can do worse than to spend one’s time musing on one’s critters and telling their tales.
If we’re lucky, we will all live to the point where we have to start making accommodations to keep writing, and then become willing to do so. Many of us started that when we raised families, dealt with day jobs, etc., and then coasted through a higher-productivity period, where we may think those accommodations are over. But that never stops, and there’s no point being frustrated by it… it’s just part of the writing life.
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “Gritting your teeth and getting on with it”
Pratchett wrote his most impactful books, in my opinion, after the dementia set in. He spoke of having to decide if any given event was more important than the books he needed to write with the time he had left. In many ways, facing our limits and our mortality allows us to grasp the heart of things in ways that we just can’t when we are still in the spring of our lives.
Oh yes. All of that. My father had Alzheimer’s for over 20 years and for much of that, we didn’t realize it because he was so high-functioning that his decline took him to “normal” and he hid it well.
I have to take notes now because I can’t remember anymore. I can’t say or write the words I see in my head.
I have to stop letting anger and frustration rule me.
One tip about household bookkeeping that I learned from my mother-in-law (MY mother kept everything in her head and that’s becoming a major issue). My mother-in-law kept a household accounts book, one page per month. Every single bill got noted down, in order, so you can look back 5 years and see how much you paid for the electric bill. List account numbers too! And, if a bill gets lost in the mail, you spot it much sooner than you otherwise would.
No, I don’t keep my bank accounts and bills online. I have more control when I write checks.
I’ve learned how to train my use of Quicken to categorize every financial transaction ruthlessly. That allows me to effortlessly pull up reports of all sorts for comparison. Makes a big difference come tax time or planning.
What I need to document is less about facts than about procedures, e.g., what are the steps to do my specific tax prep, the steps to indie publish, etc. The new problem is that the universe of must-document procedures is gradually growing as the in-brain how-do-I-do-X repertoire becomes less automatically available-on-demand. I don’t need granular procedures, just starting points and highlights for each mega-task.
On the humor front, the good news is that muscle memory is unaffected. If I temporarily can’t remember where a particular command in, say, an Excel spreadsheet, is located, I can do worse than to simply point without thinking, which is likely to show me where the command I want is lurking. So, I’m betting on persistence of muscle memory and taking a techie approach. My laptop’s “desktop”, currently full of icons of miscellaneous odds and ends, is going to become a ruthless central metaphor of stashed procedures – top left for finances, top right for communication, etc., etc., with icons directing me to procedure sets for detailed reminders/guidance. So, picture me paused in confusion for a moment, calling up my desktop image, and waving a hand at the appropriate starting points, like an orchestra conductor, to suggest a location to look for a procedure outline reminder document.
In other words, an outsourced mental re-org. I know how to do that for companies, so I just need to make that explicit for my own private “firm”. You have to get your amusements where you can… :)
At least in Windows 11, you can create multiple desktops… Just in case one screen isn’t enough. 😎