Bruce Willis Has Aphasia. So Do I. Here’s What It’s Like.

It’s hard when you can’t find the word you want.

This morning, my mom emailed me a story about Bruce Willis retiring from acting due to being diagnosed with aphasia. She told me she had to look it up. Apparently she forgot I told her I was diagnosed with a mild case of it years ago. It sucks.

What is aphasia, you ask?

To quote the Mayo Clinic:

A person with aphasia may:

Speak in short or incomplete sentences

Speak in sentences that don’t make sense

Substitute one word for another or one sound for another

Speak unrecognizable words

Not understand other people’s conversation

Write sentences that don’t make sense

My aphasia is mild. My brain pulls the wrong words. They tend to be related, like thinking my wrist hurts when it’s really my ankle. Some words happen a lot, like the aforementioned wrist vs ankle. Others I’ve never had an issue with.

Don’t ask me to give you directions verbally. I have said left when I meant right and vice versa. The interesting thing is my motor skills will get it correct even when my mouth doesn’t. I will tell someone to turn left up ahead, but point right. When the person I’m talking to expressed obvious confusion, I tell them to ignore what I say and just watch my hands. Not a good scenario with driving directions, that’s for sure.

I often read things wrong. My eyes see a similar looking word and fill in the wrong word. Misreading headlines has made me LOL many times. Often my mental replacement words make no sense in the context of what I’m reading. I’ll have to reread the sentence at least half a dozen times before I correctly read the word I’m reading wrong.

I thought of a good LOL example of how I might read something wrong:

She halved the first New Year’s Baby.

Yes, I would read that as ‘halved’ instead of the much more logical word actually there, ‘had’. I would think WHAT??? I would wonder why there’s no mention of being arrested with murder charges in the headline. Why is this in the fluffy section of my news feed vs one of the top stories? This crime is awful! Was there Biblical inspiration?

My brain will work hard to find a way to make illogical sentences make sense to the point of absurdity. Then I would read the word correctly. All those things I seriously thought would crack me up.

My aphasia is believed to be related to my bipolar II. I have noticed over the years the aphasia tends to be worse when my depression is. There have been times of severe depression where it impacts my ability to write. It’s horrifying to be stuck for over a minute trying to remember how to spell ‘the’. Google Assistant Lady can’t give me a WTF look if I were to ask, but humans certainly can. That is the true struggle for me. Knowing you should be able to find a word that basic in your brain, but can’t. I’m a terrible speller, but in a flare up I’ve messed up trying to spell a word I normally can. Even spell check can’t figure out what word I mean.

The most important thing I tell myself is not to freak out. That just makes it worse. Most of the time, I find the correct word in speech or thought within a minute. Even in reading it’s a relatively brief period of time between seeing the incorrect word and seeing the correct word. It’s harder when it impacts my ability to write. Because that aphasia symptom flares up for me during significant depression, they end up feeding into each other.

It’s also a struggle to explain it and not just because that could be symptomatic of having aphasia. My mild case means people around me are rarely exposed to it. It’s been uncomfortable when someone calls it out to clarify or correct. Don’t I know the difference between my wrist and ankle? Am I emailing drunk because I typed things like ‘closed’ vs ‘open’?

Despite the risk of sounding like I’m inebriated, I find it much easier to communicate via email than phone. Email allows me the ability to reread correspondence to make sure I am correctly understanding the conversation. I could listen to a voicemail multiple times and still have some self-doubt that I got it correct. I can reread what I’ve written many times to make sure I said what I meant to before I send it to its final destination.

There’s at minimum a few hours from writing a first draft before I even think of publishing. You should do this anyway, but I suspect I overcompensate.

I completely understand why Bruce Willis’ aphasia would derail his acting career. Acting is all about communication. Aphasia causes one’s communication abilities to misfire. My symptoms are very mild, but enough to get diagnosed with it. They have certainly been noticeable enough in my life to strongly empathize with the challenges he must be experiencing. My hope is that he is able to be patient when aware he is showing symptoms. The awareness that you are experiencing words all wrong can be as scary to you as to those around you.