Being Totally Human.

My executive function is slightly impaired. It’s like that feeling right at the beginning of the menopause, before the good, understanding doc said, ‘Let’s get on HRT,’ when I kept missing appointments and not knowing what day of the week it was.

So, I got the time of two meetings wrong and I kept wondering if I had posted this or if I had sent that Zoom link.

This is a straight bandwidth problem. I think when you get a shock and when there are sudden life stressors your brain switches into a kind of survival, triage mode and there isn’t much room for anything else. There is also an extraordinary amount of information to take in and quite a lot of decisions to take.

My poor brain. It’s not trained for all that. I live an intensely slow, quiet life. I don’t even have to decide which bus to take or which tube stop to get off at.

Why am I telling you this? Because you too, almost certainly, are dealing with the challenges of life, and if your executive function fades a little from time to time I want you to know that it’s perfectly normal and you are in good company and we’ll all get back to normal together. We’ll come back up the surface of the water, where we can paddle slowly for a little while. You, me, the woman on the Clapham Omnibus; we’ll find a way through.

I would once have been ashamed of the brain fading out a bit. Now I am fully accepting of my humanness. This acceptance is the result of years of training in The Place of Peace.

The truly lovely thing is that my creative brain is firing on all cylinders. I may not remember what time it is or who I sent which message to, but I wrote a thousand words of book and I was full of ideas with my clients.

The organisational part just needs a few days to come fully back online.

In the meantime, Darwin the Dog is sleeping in the dappled sunlight, and that alone is enough to lift the heart.