I have changed so much from the person I used to be, something I had always known and felt for the past few years. What has changed is that I have nothing to say, not in writing and not in verbal address. It is almost as if I am empty on the inside, like I have lost who I was, and like I have no memory of things I love and hate, things that make me the person I am.
I remember I began to realize this in late 2011. I had an awfully difficult time remembering books I had read, and if I did remember the titles perhaps, it was impossible to remember the details. And I had spent a lot of my time reading, and still do. This kept getting worse and worse, until I once got into a cab in London at 9 pm in the evening and he asked me "where to?" Of course, I wanted to go home but where was home, I wondered. Not in the metaphorical sense. For the life of me, I could not remember my address, not the street name, not the area, not the nearest tube station. I sat there dumbfounded for 5 minutes, squeezing hard at my brain tassels, until my great release came and I finally remembered. But that was my moment of reckoning. I even wrote about it in this blog post titled Lest I Forget One Day.
From that moment onwards, I became more convinced that something was wrong with me. Did I do anything about it? No. For the most part, I kept doing what I always did, speaking less and less. I still socialized, heavily, and was loved by my peers and people around me, and they always wanted me around, but goodness I cannot understand why. I do not say much, sometimes I do, but I am mostly quiet. And it is not a social anxiety thing, nor is it a lack of confidence or low self-esteem. I know that because I am proud of myself, and my achievements, and who I am (from what I remember), and I feel lucky to have been endowed with good looks, and I walk head up high, and I seem to be the center of attention. Not that I care, but I say all this to express my fear that maybe there is an underlying physiological issue. Maybe I have lyme disease and I don't know it. Maybe there is something wrong with my nervous system or my cognitive abilities and I need to get myself checked out. I cannot count the many times I have googled my symptoms: how to be a conversationalist, how to talk more, I have nothing to say, and the list goes on. Every now and then, the hypochondriac in me starts thinking it's some dire medical issue, but then the complacent individual I have become reminds me that it is what it is. Why do I care if I have nothing to say?
