I ended off my previous post with the following:
“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!!’”
So – with my life feeling chaotic and all my responsibilities and tasks floating in and out of my mind the whole time – where I wasn’t able to ‘keep them all’ in the back of my mind – I started to write everything down. Making to do lists and schedules and trying to adjust my schedule to my changing responsibilities and trying to make sure that I prioritized the points on my to-do list. But then here, still – there would be points as I walk around on the farm that would come up that I needed to remember and I wouldn’t have my list with me and then I wouldn’t add it on. So the same kind of stress was there about making sure I have everything on my lists. Also sometimes my lists were several pages long and it would take me a while to decide which one was the next priority that I had to get to next.
And that same point I mentioned at the end of my last post would keep recurring as well – every time I remembered something, I would go into an emotional reaction of ‘AAAAH! Crap – it’s not on my list! I forgot about it!’ – every time feeling that I’m failing to stay on top of things and going into self-judgments about it.
At the same time I started noticing more and more how others around me seemed to not struggle with these points as much – having the same amount of points to juggle, get to their tasks and responsibilities effectively and when they would in moments remember something and go ‘oh yes, I need to do this’ or ‘oh, and we have to do that’ – it would be directed and get done. No big reactions, no fuss, no stress. And no huge to-do lists either… Hmmm, interesting.
At first I would argue for my own limitations and say ‘well – their memory is just better’ or ‘my mind just doesn’t work that way’, lol. Though, I slowly but surely grew quite tired of my own stressful way of handling things and ‘trying to remember things’, so I started looking more closely at what I was doing and whether I really need to stick to that approach. It’s funny – I would be scared to forget things and then when I did remember something, where it would just pop up in my mind – I would make it a problem by reacting and judging myself. In seeing those two points of emotions – first the fear of forgetting and second the self-judgments when remembering – I figured that’s a good place to start with changing my relationship to how I remember things.
Will continue this story in my next post.