Mad Mad Mad

Last night I dreamed that I was losing my mind.

It was one of those heavy, wet-blanket dreams: the kind that seem simultaneously too, too real and very, very unreal. The kind that makes me feel as if I have hundreds of lead fishing weights hanging from every part of my body, weighting me down in the dark water of Dream.

It was completely believable, completely immersive. I was having a nervous breakdown.  I was in a gym or spa in a shopping center, and I kept misplacing things: my clothes, my soap, my purse... I would put the things down and then turn around and there were other things there... not the things I had put down, but someone else's things.  A pile of new clothes where my jacket and t shirt should have been, a dust-covered bar of hand-made soap where my shampoo bottle was.  Then I couldn't find my socks, so I got some other socks, then I couldn't find them.

I began to feel panicky.  I realized something very bad was happening to me, and it was happening inside my head.  I didn't know if the things I was picking up-- which I believed had replaced my things-- were actually mine and I just didn't recognize them anymore.  I couldn't find my way out of the spa.  I  kept coming back around to the same place. People were looking at me.

I ended up on the phone, calling my mother, telling her to come get me, I was having a nervous breakdown. I was desperately trying to hold on to everything at once because I knew if it left my hands, I wouldn't be able to find it. I was picking up objects one by one and looking at them very carefully so I would remember them, trying to hold all the objects so none could get away.

It was horrifying.

When I woke I realized that it had scared and upset me so because I sometimes feel as if just that thing is on the verge of happening to me. My memory fails me. I no longer try to keep things in sequence any more. I no longer sit with my brow furrowed, trying to remember the end of the book or movie I just read or saw. I know I won't remember it. And if I try, I'll only prove to myself that my memory... my mind ... is going. The terror of the unfamiliar seems all too near already.

I realize that people... women, perhaps, especially... experience memory lapses as they get older. Mine seem a little more ... pervasive. I joke at work about not remembering anything I've done. I try to get projects cranked through quickly because I know if I don't do them right away, I won't remember that they have to be done at all.  This morning, I told someone here at the museum that I had not received any copy for a project yet. She laughed and told me I'd sent her the final edited copy more than a week ago.  It was funny... and slightly disturbing.  Especially after the dream.

I've often thought that Alzheimers would be a horrifying disease to suffer from:  to feel your own memories, your own grip on the world, weakening and fading away.  To know where the empty spots were would be one thing... but then to begin to not realize the places were empty, but to keep stumbling across them... rediscovering your own losses over and over... terrifying .

Lately I have been thinking a lot about aging.  I'm "a woman of a certain age," after all... just turned 47, which means I'm on the down-hill run to menopause for sure now. I get hot flashes, night sweats. My memory plays tricks on me.  I always imagined that I would age gracefully, just taking the changes as they came with a sort of matter-of-fact attitude.  But I'm finding that it's harder than that... much harder than I expected, to be growing older than the youthful person I have always imagined myself to be.  The woman I see in the mirror shocks me. She has crepey skin on her neck, a roll around her middle, sagging flesh around the knees, and strange little down-turned lines at the corners of her mouth. How did this happen so quickly?

I don't think I ever considered myself a great beauty.  I knew I was lucky to be a "pretty" girl... in a nice, not-drop-dead, girl-next-door way.  Now I am discovering how very much I have always relied upon and identified myself with the way I look. If my inside was unstable and felt unlovable, well, I knew I could count on my outside to give that frightened, fragile person something to hide behind. Now, more and more, I fear that my insecurities--my teetering self-worth and mounting self-doubt--are becoming manifest on the outside, as well.  It's all there for everyone to see.  The whole crumbling edifice.  The Empress has no clothes... and nobody needs to see that.

My mother assures me that growing older is liberating:  that it gets better and better, I'll become more comfortable in my own skin.  But right now that skin feels like an alien.  It's bulgy and and saggy and bears a web of fine lines. Inside I feel no more self-assured or confident than I ever have been, which is to say, not at all.  And I cringe at the idea of trying any sort of desperate measures to stop the clock or reverse the downward drag of time. Am I going to suddenly become obsessed with how I look?  With upkeep and maintenance and damage repair?  I don't know what's worse: fighting back in a losing war of attrition, or just letting everything go to hell.  Both ways seem unbearable:  embarrassing and uncomfortable.

Perhaps I'll just go back to bed and wait until the transformation is complete.  I'll arise at 60, wrinkled, gray... but wholly reborn!  An aging butterfly.