Unstuck in Time…

November 2025 (I’m pretty sure)

I don’t even know what day it is. Sometimes I have to really think to figure out the month, or the year, or my actual age. I recently turned 50 and had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t turning 40, or 30, or 60. I just knew it was a multiple of ten and therefore a milestone. 

As a result of all of this, I was starting to worry about my brain. Is this bangin’ ADHD morphing into early onset dementia? Why am I so mentally fuzzy -completely different from the usual brain fog- and why do I feel unstuck in time? It’s like being trapped inside a fluid spiral labyrinth, only the path through keeps drifting and shifting. Like a sky blue house of leaves, moments before the wind.

I have been more than a little freaked out.

I recently had surgery following eight years of pain, and something surprising has happened. It feels like someone has let me out from underneath a bell jar, as though I have spent the past several years in a fishbowl or behind a pane of glass. I was not just in physical pain, either. I sustained the fifth concussion of my adult life in the same accident that injured me eight years ago and have had post-concussion issues ever since, including a few years of intense suicidal ideation. Nothing has felt real for a very long time.

I am still in pain from recent surgery and my brain is not perfect. New (expensive) vision therapy has me back at work on a full time basis though, and with this surgery I hope not to be dealing with constant 7/10 pain (often flaring to 9) every second of the day. A few years ago I was told that I would only be capable of part-time work for the rest of my life, and I didn’t handle that very well.

All of this positive change is fantastic, so I have been pretty surprised to find myself sobbing intermittently since feeling this relief. It’s like I am reliving emotions that were numbed and they’re entering a new type of reality or moving to a different part of my brain. Maybe finally being processed.  The other night, I visualized it as eight years worth of notifications coming through my feed all at once. 

Overwhelming. 

The past eight years have been real. This is going to take some getting used to.

I am unstuck in time. I might need to go on a Vonnegut binge.

So it goes.