Memory is associative. I have a really, really good memory, but it’s mostly because I know how to exploit that associativity.

If you asked me what I did for the last two weeks, I’d have to find “anchor” memories to relate to other memories. E.g., I remember a conversation at work on Friday, which I know was the result of a thing I did earlier that day, which I had talked about doing on Thursday, etc. I can reconstruct things, but part of that is “digging” through memories to find anchor points.

Stress can wreck memory.

I am not great with faces, apparently, because people recognize me but I don’t recognize them, a lot. Like, no shit the FedEx guy bringing stuff to my work recognized me from grade school. Some people are REALLY good at recognizing people.

In general I’d say I am much better at figuring things out, than remembering them, and it has ever been so. Even in school I passed algebra by remembering the quadratic formula and just figuring out the rest of it each time. I don’t do things the same way every time. When I try to do things by rote, without thinking I fuck them up.

If it’s bothering you, try mindfulness - throughout the day take a breath, relax and become more aware of what you are doing and hearing and seeing and feeling. Get in the habit of paying close attention.

But I do think it’s normal to sort of discard a lot and only remember a little.

I feel like I know the answer to something, and it’s usually right, but I don’t have a recollection exactly of how I know it.

If you asked me about last Wednesday or the one before, I could probably tell you eventually. You might get a lot of detail about the rest of the week along the way, because I’d have to piece together what I did and which day Wednesday was.

It would be about the same if you asked me about the current weather moments after I walked inside. I might be able to tell you, but I’m going to have to build the memories on the spot.

If you need someone to remember completely useless trivia like Pokémon type matchups and the years of video game releases, I’m your guy.

If you want me to remember what I ate yesterday, I couldn’t tell you. If you want me to remember what cities I visited on my trip to Europe two years ago, I’d literally have to look at my notes; the specifics of my autobiographical memory, even for major events, quickly dissolve into a blur of impressions and images.

Once my boss, looking for someone to blame for some infraction, asked me “Did you work yesterday?” I couldn’t recall what I’d done the day before, so I started to “umm” while I thought about the schedule and tried to remember if I’d already had my days off that week, but I couldn’t bring it to mind… so I had to admit that I didn’t know. My boss said, disbelieving, “You don’t remember if you worked yesterday!?” I said, “You know, the days all blur together…” and he just shook his head and walked off to bother someone else.

I’d say… wait, what was the question?

Recently, my life feels like a blur, like I dont really remember what happened even in the past 2 weeks, and this has cause me some anxiety. […] How much of your life do you remember, like do you only remember major events in your life, or do you remember like what you have been doing for the past 2 weeks. […]

I experience the same sort of feelings. What I find helps me a little bit is to journal at the end of the night and document what I did during the day and what happened during the day. This helps me reflect and ground myself on what goes on around me. Instead of me just existing with events passively happening around me, it forces me to sort of anchor events to my life. Having this sort of stuff documented also allows me to reflect on it in the future.

People tend to look at me funny when I tell them that I don’t remember my childhood all the way up through highschool.

Certain big events in highschool I can remember of course. But for most of it is just vague impressions of “Yeah…I must have done that at some point, but can’t recall specifics”.

For Childhood it gets even more nebulous; again, a few things I clearly remember, and much of the rest of it I can’t decide if I actually remember it, or if I’m “filling in the blanks” from old photographs (the brain is funny that way…implanting a fake memory is pretty easy it turns out)

People have told me that that’s a reaction to childhood trauma, but since I’m kind of stupidly good at holding useless trivia in my brain, I just think I pushed it all out to make room for random facts about ancient history and star trek lore.

I have very few memories unless something triggers them. I was worried about this so some years ago I started writing down what I did that day, every day, in the hope I would train my memory to remember things.

I make a new text file each day with the date and have about 6 years’ worth of them.

In case you’re wondering, my memory didn’t get any better but at least I can look up what I did if I forget. No joke this comes in handy more than you’d think.

BTW my armchair diagnosis is that my lack of memory is probably ADHD related.

My memory has been somewhat blurry/fuzzy since 2011, so yeah. After coming out from a surgery where I was under longer than the surgeons thought I was gonna, it’s been a bit fuzzy. I can remember things from a long time ago, but ask me pre-2011, middle of tweenhood and below, is hit or miss what I remember. Even after then, it can sometimes feel a little hit or miss whether I remember an event that happened.

Fire at a nearby apartment building a couple years ago? Remember. The song I was listening to 10 minutes ago? Absolutely no clue. Name of someone in my ENGL 101 class I’ve been attending all quarter? No clue for almost all of them. The time my parents got a Sonic Mega Collection game for me and my brothers when I was 4-5 years old? Absolutely remember that!

Hey do you dissociate a lot? My dissociation ruins my memory in a way very similar to yours. This questionnaire can kind of give you a guideline on how much dissociation you may have
http://traumadissociation.com/des

Yes, both.

• I’ve always been bad at remembering who I met or what we talk about
• I can doom scroll for hours without recalling anything of note
• when things are hectic the daily details disappears
• ask me a technical question and I’ll vomit entire manuals at you

Longish term cannabis dependency chiming in - not great.

I tend to remember what I need when I need it, to the point where it’s creeped out my friends.

In high school I was talking to my friend and over the phone I hear his dad asking where his favorite cup is and I remember that 2 weeks prior when I was over I briefly saw it in the top left cabinet over their stove, so I told him.

It was still there.

Kind of bit me in the butt though because his dad became uncomfortable and didn’t let him invite me over anymore, lol.

I have the most minmaxed memory of anyone I know.

I can’t remember faces. Names. Barely remember people. Events? Psssh. My coats go missing. Jackets, hats, scarves, you bet I need to attach stuff to myself and keep a gruesomely detailed calendar.

But in school, I could remember concepts really well. Not individual facts, mind you, but concepts. So I had to learn in this sort of concept-first way to “guess” what the individual facts were. I don’t remember the name of the dinner I ate last night but I knew stats geometrically/sum-ly enough to re-guess the formulas I needed to know. History classes definitely got weird with this minmax though.

Tbf I think this style is actually an emerging phenomenon. Salman Khan spoke of an “inventing math” type of learning, and 3 Blue 1 Brown and that one MIT prof forgot his name made a brilliant repetoire for geometrically/conceptually training linear algebra. Makes me wonder what pedagogy will be like in two or four decades. Hopeful c: