It's strange seeing posts about aphasia on HN every so often. When I was a teen, I suffered a stroke secondary to a TBI that had happened a few days before. As a result, I developed global aphasia and lost my internal monologue. I don't think in words anymore except when I'm either conversing with or thinking about conversing with someone else. To this day, English feels like a second language to me even though it's my native language, and I still have lingering anomic aphasia.<p>Some days are better than others, and it does affect my ability to code on worse days because I can't remember the names of even common API functions (thank goodness for IDE suggestions!), and if I'm in a lot of meetings in a day, I'm utterly exhausted by the end of the day from the mental effort of trying to tease out meaning from context when there are words in the middle of sentences that have no meaning for me. It's not really something I talk about, so only my husband and my doctor knows about it.<p>Probably the most annoying part, besides the embarrassment when I can't remember a common word, is the way my brain keeps wanting to file words in the same slot that doesn't work. So I see a word again, know that I used to know what it meant, look it up and for maybe 30 minutes if I'm lucky, I'll remember the word and its definition, but later that day, I'll have forgotten it again.<p>At least for me, it feels humiliating to forget even common words like "ice" or "screwdriver," and end up saying something unintelligible like, "Could you bring me the thing for the thing so I can do the thing?" along with vague gestures that my husband, to his patient credit, often understands.<p>In the end, I just have to quietly power through and do the best I can, and I suspect others in the same boat keep quiet about it, too, so I wanted to finally talk about it. To all of you, stay strong, be kind to yourself, and take the time you need to process information.