Tuesday I got through with two days of something fairly grueling. Not at the same level as going to a conference, but only just barely easier. I could feel my head almost humming afterwards. It was very difficult to perceive or understand much of anything, or to do much of anything. Standard overload stuff.

But the standard overload stuff reminded me of something: This is what it felt like to use speech (including having the “speech-generating modules” online even when not directly speaking) for a few hours, when I was at my best.

Have you ever had the experience of running too many fairly innocuous programs on a computer, so that the computer’s performance slows to a crawl because you’re using all the available memory? That’s what the various activities of Monday and Tuesday were like.

By contrast, have you ever had a single computer program that eats all available memory and still wants more and can singlehandedly grind your computer to a halt so that you can’t use the other programs that you really want to be using right then? That’s what speech was like, even when I was comparatively capable. It’s becoming very obvious to me why my brain decided to either delete it, drastically downgrade it, or limit its availability. That’s what happens to memory hogs.