Not Fade Away

Thinking that we’re getting older and wiser, when we’re just getting old…

We’ve recently started watching The Kominsky Method – yes, two years late, but by my standards that’s finger right on the cultural pulse stuff. If you don’t know it, highly recommended: proper Hollywood stars Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin, showing off their acting chops in a subtle chamber-piece comedy as an actor (mostly making a living as a coach) worrying about his prostate, and his recently widowed agent. It feels more like a credible (and big budget) indie film than a US television series, including the fact that it’s only eight episodes per season. Lots of dry, dark humour and lots of reflections on age and what it does to you. “You know, I wake up every morning,” says Norman, Arkin’s character, “And my first thought is, what part of me is not working today?” Ouch.

Okay, things aren’t this bad with me. Yet. I guess my issue may be a more middle-aged one: waking up (generally about half four), gently probing the state of my mind, and thinking, at what point do I have to admit that this is normal and things aren’t going to get better? It’s not physical (that’s just the effects of not getting enough sleep) but rather mental: the persistent brain fog, the memory lapses, the impaired focus (a kind of intellectual fidgeting), the inability to string ideas together or to keep an idea in mind for more than a couple of hours. If this is the way things are at 5 am, then, given my inability ever to get back to sleep, then that’s the way things are for the rest of the day. And the days drift into weeks, the weeks into months…

Where this echoes The Kominsky Method is the sense that – like Michael Douglas’ character walking into a bar full of bright young things and realising that he’s effectively invisible – it wasn’t like this in the past. This isn’t me. It’s not that I still think of myself as a bright young thing cruising metaphorical bars, as I was never like that in the first place, but my brain used to work so much better. I could elaborate ideas, and keep developing a complex argument in my head over weeks, and juggle multiple things without losing the thread of any of them. I could produce articulate sentences without effort. On a good day, I could bloody well scintillate.

And so I cling to the idea that this is just a phase, that some morning I will wake up and the clouds will have cleared, and I will then effortlessly write all the overdue articles and reviews and everything else; that I will be back to being myself. But what if this is the new normal? If this is the natural outcome of age and dying brain cells, or a more immediate effect of having had even a relatively mild dose of COVID-19, which apparently can infiltrate the brain and do as-yet uncertain things to it? I’m used to periods of depression, which can feel quite similar, but they have always passed eventually. This has gone on for longer than usual – and the longer it goes on, the more I feel the creeping fear that this be just the way things now are.

Some middle-aged men, I believe, feel a bit under the weather and start googling the symptoms of various cancers; I’ve been looking up cognitive function tests. This has been enough to determine that I’m a long way from it being an actual medical problem – except insofar as I feel myself to be not functioning in the way I used to. And the problem with this is realising that so many of my working practices have developed on the basis of taking that sort of performance capacity for granted; I used to be able to do all this stuff, I used to be able to get away with bad habits and sloppy practices – so what if I now can’t? And this isn’t going to be solved, or even shoved off into denial, by buying a motorbike. What’s the intellectual equivalent?

I normally try to round off this sort of self-pitying whinge with a more cheerful thought, or at least a self-deprecating comment. I don’t currently have one; probably I need to watch more episodes to collect some performance anxiety jokes. I can at least still write blog posts – it’s keeping it up for any longer that’s the problem…