I’m afraid of getting old. I’m not exactly afraid of dying- that’s not the problem. I’m afraid of my mind deteriorating. I value my mind more than any other part of myself. I’m not some sort of genius that has an important mind that could potentially discover the cure for cancer. I’m just a normal girl, but I love that I’m pretty intuitive. I was always able to figure out if my parents bought me the Christmas present I’d been asking for or if my friends were hiding something from me. I love the rush that floods me when I figure something out, it’s the equivalent of an athlete winning a game. My mind is also the only thing going for me career wise. I want to be a writer, to create worlds and people and magic. If I grow old and my mind goes…I’ll have nothing. What makes me… me… will cease to exist and that terrifies me.

I watched a dementia documentary- not voluntarily I may add- and it disturbed me how they documented this woman who was perfectly fine, start to slip away until she no longer recognized who she was nor the people who she once cherished. She couldn’t remember how to do the most basic human things. After a while, I had to just leave the room because there’s only so much the mind can take before a deep-rooted fear starts to grow. Two or three relatives have dementia…

And I’m terrified of getting it too. 

Growing old is inevitable. I know that. I think that’s why I’m so fascinated with vampires because they live forever. Maybe that would get old after a while, but the idea of immortality is better to think rather than obsessively worrying about the slow decaying of my mind.

I know this is heavy stuff to talk about, but if we never express our worries, they just manifest inside the mind and grow heavy until you lose your mind a lot sooner than you expected. The mind is a powerful thing but can only live for so long. Health issues can’t be avoided, but I know that if I lost my mind, I would lose my memories and be gone forever.