I’ve had people make so many jokes about my memory and how unreliable it is, because I tend to often forget things, or remember them too late. Memory is a big topic, but here I just want to look at that part of your memory where you are reminded of something inside yourself, where you remember you need to do something.
How I used to work with ‘remembering things’ was quite straining. I would actively try to remember everything I need to do, by thinking about it. Taking moments where I would go: “There were things I had to do, what were they?” And then I would go back in my memory and ‘activate’ all the things I cannot forget to do – no matter the timeframe, whether it’s something I needed to do now, tomorrow, in a month’s time or in a year’s time. I had this fear that if the points I have to do ‘sink too deep in my memory’, I would just forget about them, so I would try to constantly remember them, think of them, so they are always at the back of my mind.
When my life was relatively simple – where I just had school, hobbies and friends, it was quite manageable. I would go over each of my school subjects and check if there was anything I had to do for them, then go over my hobbies, then go over my friends – and then activate all the points I had to do in relation to each one of them. I didn’t have that many things to remember either, and with everything in my life being ‘neatly structured’, this method was ‘workable’. Although, of course – at that point, I was not really aware of my own internal experiences and how constantly trying to keep such information ‘active’ was influencing my experience of myself throughout my day.
Once I moved to the farm, that neat structure was more and more crumbling away. There were things I needed to do in my physical environment, then all kinds of different projects, emails to respond to, questions to ask, my own reactions that I needed to write about. And things would change all the time, so as soon as I tried to get into a structure and ‘routine’ of things I need to check on and remind myself of, it would be tossed in a hat, shaken, and different projects and responsibilities would come out and then I’d again try to ‘build’ that overview and structure for me to check on everything.
I started forgetting many little things that would fall ‘outside’ of these structures and I would continuously experience myself in a state of stress as there were soooo many points floating around in my mind (that I was actively keeping there) that I was afraid I would forget about. And then it would even lead to conflict about which one to do first, and that, if I now focus on completing this one task and all my attention is on one point, that within that focusing, I would already start forgetting about the other things I need to do. And I WOULD forget things, no matter how hard I tried to ‘remember’ things this way – there were always things I forgot about and when I’d remember about them, either just in time or too late – I would go into an emotional reaction of ‘AAAH!! I TOTALLY forgot about that!!’
I’ll continue sharing in my next post.