Does this make sense at all? In my head, it’s the most clear. When written, I feel like I’m not able to fully express what I’m thinking. When speaking, it’s like fucking Russian roulette and can be wonderfully put together and eloquent or stroke-like.
Is there any way to improve this or is it just the way my damn brain works?
Curious to know if anyone’s found a way to adress this as well. I’m ADHD and I’m constantly tripping over my words. I’ll either have a perfectly clear thought and just be incapable of articulating it or I’ll forget what I was going to say halfway through. It’s almost like I have a stutter or something and it’s definitely gotten worse over the last few years. I don’t remember having this problem pre 2021-2022ish. Writing is similarly bad for me, but I have an opportunity to edit and focus on what I’m doing so it usually comes out alright.
I wish I had an answer for you OP but hopefully it brings some comfort to know you’re not alone
Huh, I wonder what could have happened (and is still happening) to cause sudden cognitive impairment for countless people around the world.
Good news is you can always go back to masking. It’s not too late for you, the people you love, the vulnerable and marginalized.
Quite a bold claim, could just as easily be related to the dissolution of social structures brought about by Covid which affects someone’s ability to practice their social skills
I don’t see why both our assertions can’t be true. But I’m also willing to bet that most people in your life have long since returned to business as usual in regards to their social lives and have all but forgotten about the very real and long term threat of COVID. In the process, they have likely contracted it, numerous times, as it has become endemic in populations around the world.
Though with this return to normalcy, people should expect normalcy to return. For countless many, especially the vulnerable and marginalized, people who do not have adequate access to care and community, it hasn’t.
Smarter people than I can walk through the impacts of COVID, the illness, on society at large. On an individual level the cognitive impact of COVID is something that is verifiable and has a growing body of evidence. I know it’s a difficult reality to face that there is still a global pandemic. One with a pathogen that has been shown, time and again, to cause systemic damage to the body, including the brain.
This is not a fantasy, overblown, fear mongering. The disease is real, it is not over, and there are in fact many more diseases old and new who affect the human body in ways scientists have yet to fully understand. Our “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” mentality in modern society doesn’t reflect reality. What doesn’t kill you leaves you with scars. COVID does, on almost every part of your body.
Part of the social structures you’re referring to that could help mitigate the sheer devastation caused by diseases is universal healthcare, more medical research, public health messaging. None of these serve the profit of the ruling class though. They would rather convince us that disease is something that can be solved with over the counter medicine.
And if you can’t afford that then you’ve failed as a person. And if you find yourself being more forgetful, less sociable, having trouble articulating thoughts, well then I guess you’re just not trying hard enough. These are misattributed condemnations. We should be blaming disease. Diseases the ruling class does not care to stop.
It is a bold claim that a disease which is proven to cause brain damage, evade immunity, and mutate rapidly may have affected your cognitive ability around/after '22 when everyone was told COVID is over and it’s cool to take the masks off with no evidence of its eradication or even effective long term treatment? Is it really?
I will back you on this, this started happening to me before I ever got COVID. And then the subsequent burnout that happened for me when everyone was “getting back to normal” and I simply could not readjust like neurotypical people did made it even worse. I won’t deny that COVID could be playing a role here but it’s also explainable based on what was going on socially/societally.
Im an EMT, during that period I was testing regularly and hadn’t gotten covid until well after my communication issues started. Maybe it’s a traumatic response or something, maybe covid eventually made it worse, but it didnt cause my problem
Could be both. Trauma causes the integration of the brain to be more difficult due to dissociation which means attention/conscientiousness is much more difficult.
I’m not gonna deny your personal experience because I’m not you. But I honestly don’t think it’s helpful to have a chicken or the egg discussion about a disease that has clear links to cognitive impairment. My child has a heart condition that to the best of their cardiologists’ knowledge is not known to have a causal link to COVID. We hadn’t contracted COVID either by the time they were admitted to the hospital for acute myocarditis, which COVID can cause. My partner and I have had many sleepless nights wondering if we could have given them COVID asymptomatically and that could have precipitated into their condition. And it took a long time for us to realize that the cause doesn’t matter. What matters is knowing the threat now and protecting ourselves from it.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely agree with you broady. Covid has definitely caused this problem or problems like it in a lot of people. It’s only in my specific context where I disagree, simply because I have a pretty solid reason to believe that covid didn’t cause my problem. There were extended periods (several consecutive months) between 2020-2023 where I was tested weekly. I also was lucky enough to receive the vaccine in December of 2020, and had kept up with my boosters. We tested when we were exposed or when covid was making the rounds through the staff. I had a regular partner at that time and wasn’t working with randos, so either we were both exposed or neither of us were. Also masked up off shift, etc etc. I didn’t catch covid until November or December of 2022. I really started noticing my communication issues in late 2020 or early '21.
I know that false negatives are a thing and being asymptomatic is possible but I’ve always reacted really poorly to covid, even the shots knock me on my ass for a couple of days.
It’s so fascinating, docs have had a hard time diagnosing me with autism or ADHD so I think there’s a point on the spectrum where neurotypes overlap? I truly believe we haven’t found the best way to categorize our brains and neurotypes are the best thing we’ve found so far
I will also add, anytime I try to describe this phenomenon to others in my life, they usually just tell me that it’s anxiety. But idk that seems…reductionist?
Ngl, I suspect that I might be a little AuDHD but diagnosis is expensive. There’s also some overlap in symptoms and presentation between the two so we may just have this in common despite being different flavors of neurodivergent. With the categorization part, I think the anxiety thing is a bit reductive, or maybe backwards? Like, yeah I have anxiety for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is that whenever I talk a mess of unintelligible nonsense comes out. My anxiety doesn’t make me do that, it’s the fact that I do that makes me anxious.
And just to speculate on the categorization part, I agree. I think part of it is just that the neurotypical mind is already impossibly complex and difficult to categorize. When you throw the added layer of atypical thought patterns and behavior in, the complexity is multiplied. I also think that qualified neurodivergent people haven’t been leading the charge on the study of our minds is another issue. There are some aspects of our conditions that are nearly indescribable within ourselves, to people similar to us, and particularly to neurotypical people. If there were a greater neurodivergent presence within this area of study, I feel like they would be best equipped to determine where efforts should be focused