Disappearing Objects Phenomenon – why me, woo woo? Why me?

I feel like I'm gaslighting myself

I can already hear the cynics’ explanation for why things keep disappearing from around my house.

‘You just put it down somewhere and forgot…’

It’s what I would probably think myself on hearing such a claim, if not actually be annoying enough to say it.

Especially as I’m aware this is notion especially easy to apply to someone no longer in the flush of youth, but I know what’s gone on and I don’t think menopausal absentmindedness is an adequate explanation.

It started in my make up drawer, an area I keep very well organised using the same method as my mother, which is to save nice boxes of useful sizes and use them to create discrete areas for lipsticks/blushers/eye shadows and eye pencils.

Ah, the eye pencil…where it all began. I have a lovely Chanel one which I use every day of my life. I stroke it along my upper lash line and then put it back into the eye pencil box, which is at the front of the make up drawer.

One morning when I got to that stage of my maquillage, it wasn’t in its place. Which was odd, because I am very much A Place For Everything and Everything In Its Place kind of person.

Which is not surprising for someone with seven planets in Virgo who lives in a house with not much room for storage and has a lot of stuff.

I treat it like a ship, with everything meticulously stowed, so it’s unusual for a thing not to be where it should be.

I checked my handbag and travelling make up bag, sorted through the back of the drawer, in case I had erroneously put it in the Lipstick or Blusher Compounds, but there was no sign of my eye pencil.

Until that evening, when I opened the make up drawer again and there it was – but not where it should be with the other eye liners, in the lip pencil box. So I just assumed that in a distracted moment I’d got my pencils mixed up and put it in the wrong one.

But I started to wonder about that when this exact routine started to happen every single day. In the morning, Chanel eye pencil not anywhere to be seen, until that evening, or the next morning when it would be back in the drawer, but nestled in with the lip pencils.

So I started to take special note as I laid it back down after use, putting it in its allotted spot and taking a conscious pause to see it there. The first couple of times it disappeared and returned as usual, but then it stopped and hasn’t happened again.

I still wasn’t 100% sure whether I had just been in a state of morning distraction and unable to see it somehow, but I was just glad it wasn’t happening anymore.

Then I lost my phone. In the house. My husband called it repeatedly. Nothing. I used the find-your-phone gadget on my ipad and it said it was in the house, but I couldn’t hear the location beeps and we couldn’t find it.

I went to bed deeply hoping it would turn up in a random handbag at some point.

The next morning I was sitting at my computer when my husband called to me to come into the garden. He pointed and following the direction I saw sitting in the middle of our small front patch – my phone.

It wasn’t on the path, or even near it, where I could have dropped it somehow (and not heard it clatter on the brick path…), it was way over. You would have to actively throw it to get it to that spot.

So that was very odd, but it was comforting to have my husband in on it. Otherwise I would have been sure I had somehow imagined the whole thing. I would have gaslit myself.

I was even more grateful for his involvement in the next happening, which involved the car key. We have just one, on a key ring with a house key, which we share and whoever has used the car last drops them straight into the key bowl we keep in the hall. It works perfectly.

We were about to head off somewhere one morning and Pop asked me if I had accidentally left the keys in my handbag, because they weren’t in the bowl. That was odd, because of my deep commitment to correct storage, but I duly searched my bag and pockets.