I used to be a good writer.  Every Sunday afternoon I would write the 1500 word essay for my Freshman English Class in a couple hours.  Other women would toille over it, many pulling all nighters.   They would agonize over every word, every sentence and paragraph.

Me?  The words just came.  I remember typing so fast that there seemed to be a disconnect in my brain—the words would just flow thru my fingers to become my essays.

And they were good.  Darn good.  Especially for only spending a couple hours on them.  I was insightful.  I was knowledgable.  My ideas were clear and concise.

I even wrote a paper about the elementary particles of physics once.  It was so well done MY MOTHER understood them.

What happened?

For years, I have known that I lost “it”.  And, with time, it doesn’t get better, it gets worse.  This loss of “it”–of the ability to communicate coherent, well constructed thoughts, is disturbing.  It not only affects written communication(you should read my emails), but oral as well.

I have conversations with people who don’t know me that well and I just want to cry afterwards.  I cannot express my thoughts well–they sound so strange and unorganized to me; how must they sound to the other people??  Yet I keep blathering like an idiot talking in hopes that somehow I can pull it together.

Its almost like an out of body experience.  A really bad one where I am an moron.

My husband, the professor, often has me proof read his proposals and papers.  You know what?  He uses BIG words.  GRE words that I don’t know the meaning of, but trust he must and go on to proof what I do understand and his punctuation(I have never seen anyone abuse the use of a comma the way he does).    Sometimes I am astounded that he hasn’t commented on my addled brain.

Something to work on.