I’ve been dealing with a lot of thought loss the last few years.

And it’s gotten better.

But it’s much worse than it used to be.

And I talk about this a lot.

You know when you’re mid thought, mid sentence, mid conversation, and you lose your train of thought, and the whole conversation goes out the window, and you can’t remember what the other person said, what you were going to say, or what was even being discussed, and it doesn’t come back but sometimes it does?

A lot of times it’ll come back.

But mine don’t anymore.

They used to.

But they don’t anymore.

Maybe once every two or three months it’ll come back to me once.

But seeing as how it happens several times a day, every day, that’s not that much.

The bulk of the time, it’s just lost forever.

It happened to me for the billionth time in therapy on Wednesday this week.

Holy fucking shit did I almost lose it on myself.

I started crying.

It’s just so fucking frustrating, and it happens so often.

And I had a really good point I was going to make.

And I fucking forgot it.

Just totally forgot what we were talking about.

Forgot the topic.

Forgot what I was going to say.

Forgot what she was saying.

Forgot all of it.

It was pertinent to the conversation and concreted my point and I lost my entire fucking train of thought and the whole conversation.

Again.

For the billionth fucking time.

And I lost it on myself.

If I was alone I probably would’ve self harmed.

And my therapist, being the kind and patient person she is, talked me through it.

And I didn’t even know what she was doing or where she was going at first.

Because I never used to be like this.

I never used to lose my train of thought like this and not get it back.

Not like this.

I will be in mid conversation and lose track of everything.

It’s maddening.

I feel like I was taking a nap and suddenly woke up in the middle of a conversation and people are counting on me to respond and I have no idea what’s happening because I was asleep but that doesn’t matter I have to respond regardless.

This happens while I’m listening only too, and not having to respond.

I’ll forget what the person is talking about all together.

If I stray from the topic in my head in the slightest bit, I will lose the train of thought.

Which is not okay for a storyteller like myself who gets off topic all the time just to come back to the point, to not be able to get off topic.

So if my wildly imaginative mind goes off topic for a second while in the middle of a conversation, I will lose my train of thought and everything around it now, instead of being able to bring it back to the point.

The entire conversation will disappear from my mind.

But not every time.

Just like 50% of the time.

So it’s unpredictable which makes it even more frustrating that there’s no way to predict it.

Sometimes I’m like how I used to be, before my big episode.

Sometimes, though, I’m greatly impaired from how I used to be and I’m nowhere close to how I used to be.

It feels like my mind can’t comprehend the layers of thoughts anymore.

Like it’s too much.

Like I can do one or two thoughts, but when the complexities of the layers of them come into play in my mind, it just shuts down.

It’s like it can’t handle it.

I don’t know if that’s from the antipsychotics working on my brain, and stopping it from doing too much or what.

Like, is the medication stopping the layers of complicated voices and thoughts from being able to happen?

Or it could just be the new limitations of my mind.

My new normal.

It really depends on the day though honestly.

But all of this thought loss shit is so maddening.

Never in my life did I think I’d be this flighty and spacey.

I can’t keep track of things like I used to be able to.

I can’t organize things in my brain like I used to be able to.

In therapy we talked about why I was crying in reaction to losing my train of thought.

Like, why was this emotionally affecting me so much, so intensely?

Well, I have abandonment issues that stem from situations in childhood, and communication issues from an episodic  psychosis led life.

And if I can’t talk, I can’t communicate, and if I can’t communicate, I’ll be left behind for sure, by myself.

(And then what does that mean about the workforce, in the future too? What does that mean about a high stress situation like employment?)

It’s scary.

And I’m scared too because I wasn’t heard as a child – even when I was talking properly, I wasn’t heard, like a lot of us.

So not being able to talk properly, not being able to communicate the way I need to, and losing track of what’s being said, and what I was going to say, is extra scary because I feel as though I won’t be understood and I’ll just be abandoned again.

And a lot of my fears stem from being abandoned.

Most of them.

It’s not shocking that my thought loss triggers my abandonment issues, a lot of these things are interconnected in curious ways.

It’s interesting though.

Not being able to properly get my point across is maddening.

And when I have something to say and I lose it completely, and what I was going to say had relevance to the conversation being had, I feel like I can’t contribute anything at all and I feel utterly useless and dumb and pointless.

Like only a fucking idiot can’t remember what they were going to say every three seconds.

How fucking dumb am I?

And then all of the self loathing repeating thoughts and “I’m a dumb cunt” thoughts surface again, and I haven’t heard them in about a month now, and I fucking hate intrusive thoughts.

And they don’t go away easily.

It takes patience and perseverance to subdue them again.

I’ve noticed as my psychosis gets more and more under control, the thought loss has become less and less severe.

But it never used to be this bad, ever.

When I first was in therapy after my ”big” psychosis episode, I would lose my train of thought several times a session.

Now I’m down to once every third session or so just losing my train of thought once.

So it is getting better.

But my thoughts, and the conversation, don’t come back to me like they always have in the past.

It used to just pop back in my mind.

It used to be simple.

And now, though it’s less often than it was while in and out of psychosis, it’s just as distressing when it happens because it makes me feel out of control still.

And maybe that’s really it.

Even though I’m not out of control anymore.

The impact thought loss has on me is getting bigger feeling though.

It keeps staying this bad.

So much so that it’s driving me up the wall.

There has to be an end to it at some point.

Everything’s just so complicated nowadays seemingly.

I’m hoping one of these days my thought loss stops, or at least calms down a bit more.

Or at least I could get to a point where I can remember what I was going to say again.

That would be awesome.

Because this shit is getting old.

– Keren