The bottom line is that my vocabulary has taken a real hit, leaving me perhaps not that eloquent anymore. Then again, plenty of people probably thought I sounded more pretentious than eloquent anyway, right? Like a carhop who swallowed a dictionary. So see? There might be an upside to all this, like maybe now I’m more plainspoken. Or maybe I just sound more plainspoken (but I break just like a little, absentminded girl).
But since I expect to have a bad memory now, I pay extra attention to things, as if there’s going to be a pop quiz about my life at the end of each day. What do I recall about what I did? So I try to make a point of remembering things while they’re happening.
Of course my memory loss could as easily be caused by my drug intake over the decades that began with my late teens, or by aging, as by the electroconvulsive therapy (or a combination of all three—or as I’m fond of saying, LSD, AGE, & ECT). What I do know, though, is that my memory is a lot worse since the treatments. But, hey, it could just be that I’m remembering this whole thing wrong.
Ultimately, though, who gives a shit why I can’t remember what I can’t remember when I feel so much better, right? I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been putting my purse in the refrigerator or anything. I mainly just forget people’s names, some of whom I’ve known most of my life. But this was something I was always capable of doing anyway, only now it’s worse. Hey, even if I can’t remember their names, I’m still mighty glad to see them! And if they appear to be in trouble I can always yell, “Hey! Look out!” And chances are, if they’re not deaf, they’ll move before that sinister clown stabs them or the piano falls on their head.
Another thing is that I find myself forgetting movies and books, some of which I only recently enjoyed, which, if you think about it, is really not that bad, because now I can be entertained by them all over again. And grudges? How can you hold on to something you don’t remember having to begin with! All of which has the potential to make me a nicer, kinder, far less affected human being. Someone more equipped to live in the present, now that the past seems to be otherwise engaged.
The prelude to all of this ECT business was to take pounds of medication, which aided me in my determined quest to gain tens of thousands of pounds of weight. So my medically induced mood improvement made me look fat and awful, which resulted in my getting depressed again. So who would you rather be with? Unplugged Carrie, fat and weeping torrents of medicated tears, or plugged-in Carrie, forgetful but fine-ish, and on the right side of plump? You choose. No, wait! It’s my life. I’ll choose. One could argue that, by having regular ECT treatments, I’m paying two—that’s right, two—electric bills. One for the house and one for the head.
Ultimately, I think what all of these jolts of electricity are doing is helping to blast me to the end of any unhappiness that is not situational. I mean, really, what other explanation is there? You have to figure that there’s a limit to pretty much everything. With the possible exception of certain beyond-belief reality shows, how long can something go on, right?
Wishful Shrinking
You know the saying, “You’re your own worst enemy”? Well, thanks to the Internet, that’s no longer true. It turns out that total strangers can actually be meaner about you than you ever could amazingly be about yourself. Which is saying a huge amount with me, because I can really go to town hurting my own feelings. I know where they are.
I Googled myself recently (without a lubricant, which I really don’t advise) and I came across this posting that said, “What ever happened to Carrie Fisher? She used to be so hot. Now she looks like Elton John.” Well, this actually did hurt my feelings—all seven of them—partly because I knew what this person meant. But as I’m fond of saying, “As you get older, the pickings get slimmer, but the people sure don’t.”
Yes, it’s true. All too true. I let myself go. And where did I go to? Where all fat, jowly, middle-aged women go—refrigerators and restaurants (both fine dining and drive-thru). To put it as simply as I possibly can and still be me: Wherever there was food I could be found lurking, enthusiastically eyeing the fried chicken and Chinese food and pasta. Not to mention the cupcakes and ice cream and pies, oh my!
How could I have allowed this to happen? What was I thinking? More to the point, what was I eating? And having eaten it, why did I eat so much of it? And having eaten that much, why did I so assiduously avoid aerobics?
I bravely mustered the long-overdue nerve to literally stand on a scale and while upright, albeit intimidated, confronted my actual unbelievable weight. Of late and for too long I had been making people—doctors, nurses, pimps, stylists, and such—keep my obese(ish) update from me for the better part of an otherwise pretty bad year. I’d been assuming that I was “only” forty pounds above my ideal weight, but it turns out that the actuality was tragically closer to sixty. Way closer. And when I say way, I mean weigh.
What I didn’t realize, back when I was this twenty-five-year-old pinup for geeks in that me myself and iconic metal bikini, was that I had signed an invisible contract to stay looking the exact same way for the next thirty to forty years. Well, clearly I’ve broken that contract. Partly because, in an effort to keep up my disguise as a human being, I had a child at some point. And then, in an effort to stay sane for said child, I took pounds and pounds of medications that have the dual effect of causing water retention (think ocean, not lake) while also creating a craving for salad—chocolate salad. So yes, in answer to your unexpressed question, sanity does turn out to come at a heavy price.
And finally almost a year ago I perhaps inexcusably quit smoking—a famously fattening form of self-improvement whose reward was my being taken over by the famously challenging urge to hurl heaps of non-nutritious nourishment into that hole in my head under my nose. You might say (if you were Henny Youngman and had nothing else to do) that I was throwing good calories after flab. Anyway, before long I left my single-digit-sized slacks eating the dust in my closet’s rearview mirror in favor of leggings. You know, the ones that give and stretch to accommodate one’s ever-widening Sequoia-sized thighs. So I sported the leggings below and what was tantamount to a giant tea cozy above, my fashion statement basically being, “I’m sorry.” (“Hey,” Henny Youngman yelled at me from across my life, “whatever floats your bloat!” What a jerk, right?)
So, until I hopefully managed to get it replaced, the photo on my Wikipedia entry was grotesque albeit accurate. I can only imagine it was put there by someone who hates me and has too much time on his or her hands. I don’t know, maybe it was just one of those über-accurate pictures of someone—myself, say?—situated precariously past her fiftieth year and languishing in very unflattering lighting while being captured, for all time and for everyone with Internet access, in that flattering angle under her jaw, causing me to look not so much like someone with a double chin as someone whose neck starts at her lower lip and continues straight to her alphabet-resistant monster rack. It might just be that my jaw drowned. It was last seen lounging precariously between my face and neck, keeping them apart for pity’s and safety’s sake, and the next thing I knew I was one long head from hairline to treasured chest.