Finding the words

I had something very weird happen to me the other day, it even frightened me a little.  I have spent rather a large amount of time since returning from the United States reading and writing about culture, business and expanding knowledge base so these subjects have been looming pretty large in my mind.

Also, because business studies is something I have previously worked on for all of never, I have been stressing about it - to the extent that it has been popping up in my dreams.  Trust me, marketing managers preventing your superhero alterego from catching the villain with their dancing spreadsheets isn't something you want to happen, even in your sleep.

Dreams are dreams, though, and that wasn't the weird thing that happened to me.  No, the weird thing was when I realised I had forgotten how to talk to people. Weird right?

I was out with friends, doing everything I could to relax and put the whole assignments issue out of my mind for a few hours - which, of course, meant that I was thinking about it most of the night.  This in turn meant that I was only following the conversations in the absolute broadest sense of the term and not participating much.  For anyone out there who knows me, they will probably realise that this is fairly unusual behaviour for me and a couple of people decided to check if I was alright.

I'd like to stop for a moment to say good on them, they are awesome friends and I wish more people in the world could be awesome friends.

Anyways, they asked if things were ok and I sat there for about five seconds doing that disturbing fish thing of opening and closing my mouth while I tried to remember how to form a coherent sentence that didn't involve supply chains or market trends.  I eventually came up with "Yeah, just thinking about my assignments." and then managed to actually get into the swing of things.

This was the first time in my life that I have found myself completely unable to say anything, just forming the words was a gargantuan task for some reason.  And this freaked me out because words are so very important to me.