I lost the word "dishwasher" this week.
I was mid-sentence, standing in my own kitchen, and the word simply left. I pointed at the machine like a tourist without a phrasebook. My family waited. The word did not come. It returned three hours later, casual as anything, like it hadn't just watched me panic in front of the appliances.
It would be funnier if it were only the word. But it was also the three trips upstairs for something I never remembered. The glasses I found in the pantry. The milk I put in the cabinet. And then there's the saga that, honestly, makes good comedy: the Nordstrom and Amazon returns that have been on tour for weeks — the counter, to the car one optimistic morning, back into the house, and now the returns bench in my room. (Yes, the returns have their own bench. They're on it as we speak.) The one that doesn't make good comedy: the appointment I keep meaning to book — the one that's mine. (It's a colonoscopy. My dad died of colon cancer when I was thirteen, so believe me, I know exactly how much this one matters. And still it waits — because finding a day that works around everyone else's calendar is its own project, and some days that phone call is simply one task too many.)
That last one is the one that aches. Because everyone else's appointments are booked. The refills get chased, the checkups get scheduled, the forms for other people get finished. Mine waits. I keep telling myself I'll book it when there's a quiet moment — and the quiet moment never comes. So it waits, and the waiting compounds like interest.
In the middle of all this, the scary thought showed up, the one I'd bet lives in your house too: I'm losing it.
Here's what I want to say to that thought, for me and for you.
Think about everything a mind like yours is holding right now. A parent's appointments and the questions to ask at the next one. A kid's schedule, and the emotional weather of that kid. The refill that can't be late. The birthday that can't be missed. The forms. The follow-ups. The list you run in the silent car — no radio, just everyone's everything, on loop.
A mind can be so full it spills. The forgetting isn't your memory failing. It's capacity meeting reality.
It's what carrying looks like from the inside.
There's a difference between a cup that leaks and a cup that overflows, and it matters. One is broken. The other is simply being asked to hold more than a cup was ever meant to hold — and holding most of it anyway, day after day, without applause.
So no — you're not losing it. You're carrying it. The word that vanished, the room you walked into for reasons unknown, the returns on their third lap between the counter, the car, and the bench: those aren't evidence against you. They're the receipts of everything you're holding that nobody sees.
Give yourself the grace you'd hand anyone else carrying that much. And if a word goes missing mid-sentence this week, let it go. It knows the way home.
Finding the sweet in the squeeze. 
