There's a benefit to losing one's mind

Regular readers of this blog will notice that I haven’t written anything for quite a while and the answer is that I haven’t had anything I thought was worth writing and I haven’t been very well psychologically.

I lost my second cat, Blossom, on 26^th October 2017 and it completely destroyed me.  I went into a spiral of depression and grief that damaged my resistance to a bout of influenza in mid-December that turned into pneumonia over the Christmas and New Year period that didn’t fully subside until late January/early February this year.

The result of all that has been that I have lost what little empathy I had for the human race and have isolated myself as much as possible from the outside world.  It seems that I was correct in my assertion that having a cat to look after kept me human and allowed me to retain my humanity and empathy.  I do still have the same emotional range that I had but it only manifests in relation to animals and fictional film and TV characters (so much so that any sad events portrayed in those visual amusements can reduce me to tears).

Since Blossom’s passing I have found that I can’t be bothered in writing about politics, social injustices and the cruelty of the current UK ‘government’ because I feel that people just don’t care or that they’re not listening in the first place so what’s the point in wasting my time?

There is also another development that is more worrying.  I cannot seem to concentrate for more than an hour or two at a time and I am becoming increasingly forgetful.  I forget what day it is on a more regular basis than I am comfortable admitting and my train of thought can derail in an instant so that I can forget what I am saying (or writing) in the middle of a sentence.  I have noticed that I can make a shopping list for my rare trips out of the flat and find that I have forgotten to buy something that was on the list because, for some reason, I didn’t see it on the list.

I can’t concentrate on the movies and TV shows that I try to watch so they have become more of an exercise in visual and auditory distraction from the silence than the enjoyable journey into a fictional world that they should be.

I still have days where my concentration returns and I’m not as forgetful and I can have periods of clarity on even my bad days.  I even wrote a review of a movie for my Vault From The Abyss blog but it took me four weeks to complete the review to my satisfaction and the movie is only about 64 minutes long.

I suppose it could be that I’m succumbing to ‘senior moments’ but it seems a little too early for that to be happening given that I’m only 47.  I’ve mentioned my forgetfulness to my Mum but I haven’t shared with her my concerns that this could be more than just getting older as she is going through her own age-related decline given that she’s in her early 80s.

I don’t seem to have reached the level that Mum has reached yet but I can’t help thinking that we’re in a race to see which of us is going to lose our mental faculties first.

Am I just suffering from a decline in mental health due to isolation and grief?  Am I having trouble with my memory due to the years of trying to repress all the bad memories?  Or am I just losing my mental acuity due to the onset of age-related illness?

I don’t know and perhaps I don’t want to know because, as my ‘government’ is trying to kill me and my fellow disability benefit claimants, it may be a blessing that my mind is going so that I won’t feel so betrayed as I just won’t know what’s going on.