It's a girl thing

And so, here's the thing...
I love words. In any shape and form. I love learning new ones. I love dissecting mysterious ones to understand their meaning. I adore making up new ones, despite the stink eye I get from my Scrabble opponents. I love connecting words to sentences to paragraphs to essays to novels. I love reading other writers' words and breathing in their language. Words are my thing. And it's the words on the page that come easiest to me. I can jot down my thoughts, with no troubles whatsoever, in a mad dash to get them down before I lose them from my consciousness. And yet, when I attempt to verbalize those same words in conversations of the "real time" kind, my words are nowhere to be found. My search for the right word at the right time is, at times, painful, frustrating, and even embarrassing. After all, I profess to be a writer, or at least that's what I thought I was. A communicator needs words at her fingertips. So, tell me this: How can a wordsmith call herself a wordsmith if the mere notion of word attainment proves unsuccessful? It makes no sense to me. And it's worse when I'm attempting to share my thoughts with people I admire and hold in high esteem, such as my husband. Our conversations are often cryptic, mostly on my side of the dialogue, especially when I'm making a point of great importance. Like those times when I've been asked to explain the larger than normal balance of my credit card, or the occasions when I need to describe the dialogue I had with my mechanic just before the outrageous bill arrived. For some reason, it's at those crucial instructional times that the words escape me. It is bizarre, and so, I seek out professional help: my family doctor.
The words "peri-menopausal" form on her lips. "And it could go on for years," she adds.
"Fabulous," I reply. So, on top of night sweats, erratic periods, and emotional roller coaster rides, my love for language is affected by my femaleness. Look at it this way: you're not illiterate, unintelligent, or absent-minded. No, not at all. You're hormonal. There's a cure for that: gathering with other menopausal friends over and wine and laughter. The conversation is not important.