Today’s prompt comes from 100 Inspirational Journal Prompts by Melissa Bolton @ The Mogul Mom
Your biggest fear & how to conquer it.
My biggest fear is that I will develop Alzheimer’s in the near future. I am already showing early symptoms, but I do not know if this is true Alzheimer’s or just the progressive memory loss I’ve had since childhood.
I used to worry about my long term memory. It is very selective. I tend to remember negative events and very few positive ones. I struggle with names of people from my past and even locations. Lately, my short term memory seems to be affected. Sometimes, I cannot remember the names of people like celebrities (actors, musicians, artists, etc.) and if I cannot remember their names, everything associated with them seems to be wiped out as well. I have to double checks things that I do because moments after I’ve done them, I cannot remember if I actually did do them. If someone asks me to do something, I have to do it right then and there because if I let even a few minutes pass, I will completely forget to do whatever it was. Even reading has become more difficult for me. I have to re-read passages often because I will forget what I’ve just read. And I constantly misplace things, something that I never had many problems with in the past.
The most troubling memory lapse is not being able to come up with the right words to express myself. I know what I want to say, I just cannot find the words. It’s as if all the vocabulary I’ve learned throughout my life has holes in it. Sometimes the right words will fall through and other times they are lost in the void. This is frustrating for me as a writer. I have to play word association games with myself sometimes to find the actual word(s) that I want to use.
I honestly don’t know if there is any means of conquering this. When the memory lapses happen, I panic. I’ve even had full-blown anxiety attacks because I cannot remember something. The fear and frustration is all too real. I’ve always been a list maker, but these days, lists are my salvation. And I have notebooks filled with just things I need to remember, sometimes people’s names and how I know them, and sometimes words I have tried to remember many times and when I finally remember, I write them down. My life has changed a lot over the years as I deal with these memory issues, but the one constant is fear.
As the Fates Would Have It 