Falling into herself: the Mermaid chronicles her descent into a strange mental world

1) A tendency to forgetfulness
This has started to bug me. Every now and then, I am so overheated in my head with thinking about this and that and the other, that something will steam up and I will mislay my keys or forget my phone or someone's name will completely evaporate.

But until recently, these have been few and far between, incidents that were notable for their infrequency, not their frequency. Just three weeks ago, I left my phone at home three times in the space of five days. I regularly forget people's birthdays, things I have to do, where I am going and what I am meant to be doing. I have started emails and forgotten two whom I am writing.

Thing is, I write lists. Copious lists. I have electronic and paper based diaries. I always keep memos of what I need to do and things to remember. But I have been forgetting to look at these.

2) A glaringly long-term memory
Simultaneously, my long-term memory has been sending me flashbacks from the past that have startled me with their glaring intensity. Scenes like a snapshot of my young life have flickered before my waking mind, vivid, suddenly.

I will remember a poem, a line from a book, a sensation of my first taste of olives, a scent of cleaning fluid, the first thing I heard a boy - who later became known to us as 'Big Will' - say at university on the occasion of the first dinner the first night at Tetley Hall ("Flipping hell, look at all the birds"). I will suddenly recall the lyrics to a song long dormant in my neural recesses.

It concerns me that I can remember the distant past and forget the immediate, the just-gone moments.

3) Easy distraction
I will be in the middle of a conversation at work or church or in a professional context and, without realising it, I have somehow gotten the stranger down a complete side road, a leafy avenue of conversation that has nothing to do with corporate bonds or the problems with pensions liberation.

We end up discussing ticks on dogs, the smell of autumn rain, my childhood terror of ceilings that prompted me to cling onto the nearest wall and refuse to let go.

Or I go online to check on someone's job title. I end up on twitter, then flick to a flickr page, then onto a facebook group and so on and so on until I realise I am reading a Daily Mash article about Kim Kardashian's shoes and I have no idea how I got there, or what I was doing at the point of my distraction.

I do not know how I manage to get any stories written or articles produced or the desk managed.

4) Denial and displacement
I know my wedding dress does not quite fit me. I am a little to big for it. I am getting married in 80 days' time. I am ostensibly dieting, I convince myself I am dieting. I am not. I am eating carbs - more and more carbs. I am drinking coffee and getting to bed late and waking up late and drinking coffee and eating carbs and sugar and cakes, all the while knowing that this is not helping but perpetuating the cycle.

But get this - I am still convinced that I am on a diet. I feel that I have hypnotised myself into believing that I am losing weight, that I am on a diet. I cannot believe that my 'little snacks' are anything more than a one-off, any more than I am convinced that my increasing forgetfulness is a series of 'one-offs'.

I am also convinced that when I do eat - it is other people's fault. I am out with them, or being led astray, or coerced into eating what they put in front of me. It is everyone's fault but my own. Except nobody has force-fed me anything. This is all my own doing.

5) The fog
All this above has helped to create a fog. I am walking from day to day in a fog. I am unclear about where I am going, what I am doing - what I am SUPPOSED to be doing, who I am and what did I do with the thingy that I need for the wotsit? You know, the doo-dad that goes in the thing? The who what dowotta now?

Sigh. I am not myself. I am in invisible cotton wool. I have been cocooned in mental bubble wrap, perhaps to protect me against the inevitable pain that will come with the house sale and the house move and the wedding and the honeymoon and the lifechange that is all happening within the next three months.

My fear is that when all this change is done, when all the fog has cleared, will I be the same afterwards? Will I still feel mentally dazed and confused? Has the process of madness commenced already - am I falling into myself? I have met and mentored so many people whose process into a state of duality has started with this dizzying whirl of mental, physical, emotional activity. I am genuinely worried that this will happen to me, and this is why I am writing this blog again, starting once more to collate my thoughts and compose myself. The mermaid is looking for herself and wants to find her.