Scatterbrain

Posted by: Sacha on: 14/03/2011

• In: Life in general
• 3 Comments

Of all the people I currently know, with the possible exception of my 92-year-old grandma-in-law, I feel I can safely say that I have the worst memory.  Short term memory, that is.  I know we all forget stuff from time to time, but I do feel like time-to-time is an inadequate description for how often I forget stuff. Important things and all.

I was never that great at remembering stuff.  Being a daydreamy kind of child, I was always forgetting things, to the despair of my parents.  At the time, I just thought it would get better as I got older.

Then I got older and I was still just as scatty.  Noticeably worse when I had chronic fatigue syndrome years ago – as a poor poor friend will testify, I even forgot to go to the cinema one time (said friend, having bought the tickets, had to see the movie all alone).  And that has not improved with children either.  It is almost like each child fills up a certain amount of brain space, and the memories get pushed out further and further with each child.  Or maybe it has to do with tiredness?  That would explain it being exacerbated with the chronic fatigue; it’s even a medically established symptom.

Sometimes it almost seems to be subconsciously selective, though please believe me when I say these examples were definitely not deliberate! Remembering to do the reading for the Sunday communion, which, at 9.30am does involve sacrificing a lie-in, for example.  How about remembering to turn up for a physiotherapy appointment when, as a student, I can’t easily afford it.  Yup, I have forgotten both these things and more.

Sometimes it’s just horribly random.  Such as when the rest of the school turned up in spots for Children in Need day at school, and oldest child was the only one still in school uniform.  Such as at work, where you think you’ve arranged a meeting for your boss, you send him across London, and he discovers for you you’d forgotten to tell the other person.  All in all, not good.

It’s particularly annoying if I am teaching a class, and I lose my train of thought mid-sentence.  And I bet there’s one or two of you reading this where I’ve forgotten to turn up somewhere and you’ve just been too polite to tell me.

I once read a book on how to remember stuff better, but it was really no help unless you had no pencil for a shopping list (you were supposed to visualise stuff in a certain way, and then think of those things in the supermarket as you went round), so if anyone has any techniques to improve memory retention that are vaguely realistic, I’m all ears.

And if you’re one of the many, many victims of my forgetfulness, I apologise!