Fooled ya!
Drying out from a coffee addiction?
Strike TWO!
Instead, I'm pondering retrieving lost skill sets, admirable personality traits, & even lost IQ points.
And I'm starting to believe those are attainable goals. 
A few years ago, after a lifetime spent happily concocting away in the kitchen, I forgot how to cook. 
I don't mean I forgot my fave recipes. I had only used recipes as research on time & temp, always riffing away merrily. Granted there were a few epic fails in there, but on a whole I think you'd find me a good cook, and I enjoyed it.
And then one day, Darwin came to dinner.
As a confirmed nocturnalist, I never minded & was in fact happy about cooking great, balanced meals from fresh ingredients & delivering them to the refinery gate or the molasses pier at midnight. My old love would come past the guard, past the barbed wire & to me in the parking lot. We'd sit in my ancient Cherokee, he'd eat, be very complimentary about what I had served, we'd neck a little, then nap through the rest of his dinner hour, holding hands over the gearshift. If we knew he couldn't stay & would only be able to take the food to go, I'd add a sprig of blooming basil to the bag, imagining his slow-spreading smile when he found it.
Shut up. Romance is where you find it, & we liked blooming basil; alright? Don't judge. It gives you wrinkles & antacid addiction issues.
And then life changed (as it does--no Jeep-bound dream lasts forever) & he went stateside to spend vaca with his kids who lived with his ex wife. For ten days. He found the kids unsupervised, undisciplined & living on McDonalds (which he blamed for the downfall of the human race).
He took a job in a steel mill, an apartment close to the kids' school, worked graveyard so he'd be with them after school, re-taught his born-in-STX, raised in VA kids to love fresh fruit.
He also forgot to tell me he had moved. Instead, two months of long, late-night phone calls (pre-cell, when they cost big bucks), hemming, hawing, declaring, swearing, promising & delaying...really started to royally piss me off. A man of few words & those few frequently smothered under my tirades of verbiage, he could never stand disappointing me & could never quite express why he wasn't yet back home with me. I had some trust issues based on past experience & a great imagination, & that combo led me to fill in gaps with the worst possible versions.
At the three month mark, I forgot how to answer the phone. Caller ID wasn't a thing yet, so if I was expecting another call I'd have to answer, & hang up when I heard his voice. As much self-preservation as vindictiveness, I simply couldn't hear his voice without becoming a quivering mass of melancholy. I swear David carried a roll of Bounty with him that entire 16 months, for the inevitable gushy mess I had become. You want to know who your true friends are? Try being inconsolable for over a year.
Slowly, patiently, D cajoled, tolerated, kidded & snarked me out of it, until I was almost human again. He didn't cook, so we ate in restaurants almost every night. I figure we both ate substantial house downpayments that year.
I did not lift a pan, a wooden spoon, a spatula that year. My kitchen was yet another reminder of how the best time of your life can morph into the worst in one plane ride. I cleaned a small area in the dust for my coffeemaker, & that was the only area I paid any attention to at all.
And then, 16 months into his ten day vaca, he came back.
And I still refused to take his calls or see him. I wouldn't know his reasons--the backstory of his extended stay--until months later. I wouldn't forgive him until long after that, & we wouldn't reboot, forgive & start our life together again for even longer after.
Eventually we lived together for several years. The kids would spend summers with us & his parents. For all appearances normalcy had returned.
But I forgot how to cook. I had so thoroughly & carefully repressed all things culinary that it appeared I couldn't go back. At one point I made a weak attempt, having to look up proper egg boiling time in 'Joy.' There was, in fact, no joy to it, & I abandoned efforts. D & I still ate out two or three times a week. Without ever saying a word about it, it was understood that if you wanted a meal in our house, you'd better cook it. I did the shopping & B did the cooking, for both of us on the nights I was home. There was no animus, no blame or resentment. Just his cooking & our eating.
I didn't really recover my cooking skills or love for it until over a year after we called it quits for good. It was slow going & I tend to similarly spice a lot of different dishes, but I'm secure in saying I'm once more a decent cook.
I think I stopped reading when my eyesight became challenging. I had been a voracious (literally--I scarfed books like they'd spoil if left too long) reader my whole life & had 20/20. At 41 the jewelry work took its toll & I started requiring readers in escalating strengths...& I stopped reading. 
More accurately I forgot how to read for pleasure.
When home, I'd be in front of TV & making jewelry or ornaments. For hours.
Last year I realized how sedentary I had become (my bathroom scales were only too happy to inform me, the bastards), & eventually self-disgust evolved into action. One day I was exasperated with the cable company, seized the moment & gave them their spawn-of-satan cable box, admonishing them to never darken my door again...except with wifi. I needed their wifi. While I was in a chopping mood, I told them to put my erratically functioning landline where the sun don't shine. For months the only calls I received on it were from one patient & non-enthusiastic stalker guy & the CDC, polling to see if I had vaccinated my nonexistent kids. Sure I'd miss them, but I'd live. And live a long time on the compound interest-enhanced cable & phone deposits. I didn't have to pay for the remaining wifi service for 7 months, living off those credits.
I got Netflix but wasn't thrilled with the selection, most offerings dating to after WWII & being in color thus leaving me out. I watched my DVDs, & eventually, after rehabbing the back yard to contain several great reading spots, picked up a book.
In March I started trying in earnest to lose a substantial amount of weight. I realized tv & mindless eating were wired together in my head. I knew at 54, I'd have to change everything, to do every aspect right if I was going to have any appreciable success. Restaurants would be a much less frequent occurrence. Physical exertion would be crucial. I have a fabulous gift for self sabotage I'd have to strategize ways to overcome. I'd have to really commit.
I remembered how to cook, to read for pleasure, to garden on a big scale. In my mind, one mantra: 'Then we will do that which is hard.' I'm lifting, toting, shoveling this space into submission. I pretty much live off spicy black beans I cook from dry, fresh veggies, salads, sushi tuna & key lime water, & I don't feel deprived...much. 
When I get home from work I grab my carefully portioned dinner, my book, & head to the umbrella table out back. I read 2-3 chapters & then plot the evening's project. At some point each day I make Mu happy by getting in the floor to do yoga & crunches. She loves all the outdoor time, too. Always a bonus when you make your pup happy.
Twenty seven pounds, several books & a lot of hardscape later, I feel better than I have in several years. My buddy Darwin is showing me once again the joy of adaptation, of recovering.
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