I have a genuinely lousy short-term memory.
This is not something that has shown up in my life because I'm getting older it is something that has been with me since I was a kid.
As I have written before, I managed to get by in life in a reasonably functional manner because I keep endless lists of everything.
It would be easy to say "this is where the story ends" and just leave it at that. I have a bad memory, I keep lists, I get by. Case closed.
But it's actually not that simple, even though I wish it were.
Lists or not, having a lousy short-term memory is exhausting!
It is exhausting because you spend an awful lot of your life worrying about whether or not you forgotten something, and whether or not everything you needed to remember actually got written down on your list, and sometimes even worrying about whether or not you remembered your list!
What becomes exhausting is the constant second guessing yourself.
In my peculiar little world, this predicament is married to an almost obsessive re-checking to make sure that I actually did the things that I checked off my list as having done. I suppose you could claim that it's a variation of OCD-ish tendencies.
Then again, it may just be that it follows naturally from the fact that I have nearly always tested very high in terms of "neurotic tendencies."
I often pause to think about whether this is a case of nature or nurture. While it's a popular sport for people to "blame their parents" for everything that's not working right in their lives, I tend to shy away from that. Granted, they were very perfectionistic and had very high expectations of me but I don't think that's their fault exactly.
Family lore — as told to me by other members of the family who were around at the time — suggest that I was always an anxious baby, even when I was in the crib. And that was long before expectations of others were imprinted on me.
Why do I even care about all this stuff?
I guess it's my own version of coming up with "life hacks" that somehow make my existence a little bit easier. And because it bothers me that I spend so much time feeling emotionally exhausted... which means I am less productive, which leads to my beating myself up for being "lazy" because I don't get things done.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!
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2026.05.08 00:58 PST
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