July 1, 2025 was not a good day.

Some things about me are improving as I age. I easily maintain my weight, I sleep great most nights, I rarely feel cold, and my daily life is relaxed and easy, because I’m retired so I do mostly what I want. On the other hand, I am physically less able than I prefer, have a few aches, am slower to accomplish tasks, and can’t remember and/or forget a lot of small things.

One thing has always been true of me and still is: When stressed, I my brain freezes.

The most horrifying example of this in my life happened in Exeter, New Hampshire on a family trip. We stopped at a park on one of the smaller numbered roads, perhaps route 27, and for some reason we lost track of our three-year-old and he showed up in the middle of the street. People started shouting and I looked up to see something impossible, namely, a small boy in the road facing a car stopped directly in front of him. His head hardly cleared the grill; I don’t even know how the driver saw him. I froze. My brain simply did not accept that this could be happening.

My husband raced past me into the street and snatched him up. Similar things have happened to me several times. If I’m nervous about a deadline, or trying to get something done in a hurry, I’ll forget the most basic things, for example my own zip code. Or I won’t be able to log into my computer, something I do multiple times a day, because I forgot my password. Stress sets my brain function to Off.

Interestingly, this wasn’t a problem in the workplace. Maybe because high tech work requires one to show no fear? I don’t know, but I faced many stressful situations at work with relative equanimity usually, and wrath occasionally, but never with brain dysfunction. But that was then.

The second most horrifying incident happened this morning. After months of tens of daily tries to schedule a visa interview online, I got through. Instead of Please try again, the screen said Choose your appointment time. I was stunned, but quickly clicked on the next step, which revealed that there was literally one appointment left in August. My husband had been up a lot of the night trying, and we knew for sure August appointments weren’t opened yesterday, so this meant that they were going very quickly.

I thought I nabbed that appointment but there were more steps, and soon I got to one that didn’t work. The computer wanted me to download a picture, yet it simply would not accept the one I had. I started to edit. I was using my phone rather than my computer, and I quickly realized I didn’t know how to fix it. I woke my husband and explained the issue and we both started working on it, but to no avail. There was a timer running and we didn’t manage to get through the registration process before it expired.

in retrospect, I realized I probably could’ve just skipped that step, or maybe entered a picture of something else then edited it later. I’m not sure. But basically I lost all my reasoning ability and freaked out and focused on this particular step without thinking it through. My husband was helping very much, but he had just woken up and he took my word for it that what I needed was this picture, which was a perfectly logical thing for him to think. I was the one whom logic deserted.

The bottom line is we had an appointment for a brief shining moment but now we don’t have one, and it will be another month before the September appointments are open. Things are getting worse at the San Francisco consulate. When the June appointments opened, they filled in four days. When the July appointments opened, they filled in one day. When the August appointments opened, today, they filled in two hours, which I know because I called to see if anyone could help me. The opening dates vary and are never announced; you just have to keep trying.

This is a big deal for us because an August appointment was our last chance of keeping our original schedule. Now we either can’t go to Spain at all, or we have to sell our house and move somewhere else before we move to Spain. We will probably do the latter because every single day another significant right is abrogated in our country. But this was a big, big blow. I wept. My husband cancelled his appointments and slept. We are both battling some despair and realizing we have to make a new plan but not feeling like doing it.

I used to say these are “first world problems,” but I don’t believe I live in the first world at the moment. I want to. That’s why this is so fraught, and fraught makes my brain freeze more likely.