Saturday, September 7, 2019

Hurricane Fuzz Brain

I am feeling a bit brain-frazzled.  A week of keeping tabs on a slow moving hurricane will do that to a soul, I guess.  I am also feeling an odd stress hearing all these stories of storm survival (or lack of survival) coming out of the Bahamas.  It's a bit of PTSD, but it's also something different--that shiver that says that we lucked out this time, but at some point, our hurricane survival luck may run out.

I feel like I should claim any PTSD--have I really had trauma?  Not in the ways that Bahamians just did--but yes, we've had lots of destruction through the years, and while it's survivable, it's taken lots of time and energy and phone calls and money.  Does that count as trauma?

So, yes, we've had trauma, but I don't know if our response to it really rises to the level of a disorder. It seems normal to me, and it's not the life-disrupting kind of response to trauma.

I mention all of this because yesterday I discovered that I had completely forgot to go back to the church to make the bank deposit.  Usually we do that on Sundays, but because of the impending hurricane possibility, the overnight deposit box was sealed.  I volunteered to make the deposit when we all returned to work.

By the time we went back to work on Wednesday, it had completely slipped my mind.  I didn't remember until the series of e-mails that I read yesterday morning that wondered what had happened to the deposit.

Happily, it was easily fixed.  I made the deposit, and all is well.  But it haunts me, this failure of memory.  It makes me wonder what else I've forgotten to do.

But let me end on a hopeful note.  This morning, I did work on my novel first thing.  If I can do that most days, I will be happy.  At least my hurricane fuzz brain isn't making it impossible for me to write.

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