About a month ago, my Psychology class started studying unit 2. At the onset of this unit, our teacher smiled apologetically and said, “Now, I feel it’s only fair to warn you before we start. When you’re studying psychological diseases and their symptoms, you’ll start diagnosing yourself with every chemical imbalance and disease you read about. You don’t have them, OK? Everyone feels depressed sometimes, and everyone has trouble concentrating at times, and everyone gets the shakes occasionally… it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, OK? So don’t stress about it.”

At the time, this sounded like a really weird warning. Was she sure the entire class would start diagnosing themselves with everything we studied? But… why would we do that? It didn’t sound like a very rational — or likely — thing for us all to start doing. As a result, I completely disregarded this warning… and let my guard down.

I haven’t been feeling well today. It’s probably one of those all-too-common winter bugs, but a really weird one: no coughing, no sneezing, no sore throats, no aching joints. Instead, I feel like I’m just… not functioning. It’s hard to say that, because I clearly am getting by. It’s just that there’ve been so many little lapses in… functioning… and since we were studying neural diseases all morning they seemed a lot more significant than usual.

One thing that is indisputable is that my temperature gauges have totally broken down. I woke into my Psychology classroom this morning and almost passed out from the wave of heat that hit me. It was odd, since that room’s not usually known for its tendency to overheat. It got even odder when everyone around me agreed that it was cold. They might have agreed it was cold, but I still felt like I was about to pass out from heat. Later on, I was standing outside in the glorious sunshine… shivering like crazy and with chattering teeth. I wailed about how freezing it was, and Cassi tried to explain that she wasn’t complaining about the cold, and if she’s not complaining, it’s really not cold1. The fact I cannot properly feel temperatures is what makes me think it’s a winter bug.

But the paranoia remains.

The problem is, that’s not all that’s been wrong with me today. For lack of better words, my memory has gone to shit. I literally CANNOT REMEMBER THINGS that I should be able to. I cannot spell anything today. This is extremely worrying because when I think of words, I always think of their spelling rather than their pronunciation. I can’t really explain it (especially not today), but basically I visualise words and… “read” them when I’m speaking. I definitely can’t explain it; that’s not an accurate description. But anyway, today I’ve been periodically forgetting how to spell just about every word in existence2, so I can’t visualise many of the words I want to say. As a result, I can’t say these words, and I really can’t communicate as effectively as I’m used to. As I’m sure you’ve noticed this entry. I can read other people’s writing without difficulty, it’s just forming my own sentences I’m having trouble with. As you might have been able to tell from the weirdness and not-making-sense-ness of this paragraph, it’s an extremely weird feeling. I don’t have the words to describe it. As a result, this feeling has been making me kind of paranoid that I do have a neural condition, just like my Psych teacher warned me I shouldn’t scare myself into thinking I have.

I mean, I think it is (hope it is) some kind of winter bug… but what kind of winter bug does this? And, for that matter, what is “this”? Is it blocking connections in the brain? Is that what “this” is? See, I don’t even know the answer to that. Alternatively, it could just be stress. I wrote yesterday about my panic attacks, and it’s very possible that this is just a different manifestation of that stress. So, those are two very plausible explanations that are not “I have a debilitating neural condition and may die”. I’m going to go to bed now and get some sleep — hopefully I’ll actually feel better tomorrow morning.

  1. She’s very sensitive to cold weather. [↩]
  2. I’ll happily write a “word” like “ntoiced” and spend far longer than is really acceptable trying to work out what’s wrong with my spelling. Say, um, fifteen seconds. Luckily, Firefox spellchecker speeds up this process a lot — if it didn’t, you wouldn’t even be seeing this entry. I’d give up after a couple of sentences. [↩]