I’ve said again and again that I’ve always had a bad memory. It may even be getting a bit worse in my now middle-age. And I can’t imagine it will improve as I get older.
I remember many things from my childhood and teenaged years, a childhood fear here, a fun date night there, the words to songs my grade school basement band recorded… what I remember from when is all over the map, but I have those, so it’s not like they’re just gone because they’re lost via my bad memory. Whereas these days, any time anyone asks if I can recall a particular detail from perhaps the previous week, I’ll say that I don’t remember what I had for lunch two days ago, so certainly don’t know the detail they’re asking about. (This is only half-joking. There are plenty of things that I’ll remember that far back and far longer ago, but it doesn’t happen to be the particular tidbit that they’re asking for. The bit about my lunch is actually often true, but I’d like to think that’s a matter of my brain not recording what’s often a daily banality than having a bad memory, per se.)
Perhaps bad memories are genetic. My father and his sister both told me ages back that their memories aren’t super. That aunt’s memory is bad enough that when she still had a landline in the house, she employed the old school idea of having a notepad by the phone because if she was given any pertinent information on a call, she found she would forget it between finishing the call and relaying the info to her husband or getting over to the wall calendar to write it down. Instead, she’d jot down the info in the moment and then have it on hand to help her remember it. A classic, and still effective, solution.
And it seems that I’ve got the same memory problems.
Over the years I’ve started to increasingly lean on my phone for reminders. Not just standard old school calendar things like birthdays and appointments — which we do note in our house on our fridge calendar — but just things I have to do day-to-day, or even hour to hour. Because I can, will, and do forget an awful lot of it.
Some days I’ll forget to do entire errands like go grocery shopping, let alone what I needed to get. The items to buy while shopping have their own list.
Other days I’ll forget other various and sundry To Dos from my tailored digital checklists. Even important things. Hence having the To Do lists in the first place. Now if I could just remember to look at them (ha!).
Here’s a fun fact: Yesterday morning I was heading upstairs to brush my teeth and get my contact lenses in, and the kiddo asked me to grab a hoodie from the back of the upper floor washroom door while I was down the upper floor hall anyway. “Remind me while I’m up there, because that’s, like, three minutes from now, so I may forget,” I joked.
Then it turned out I actually did forget to do it.
Three minutes, people. That’s all it took. And honestly probably less.
I will often refer to this as having the memory of a goldfish, because everyone gets that reference. My issue is that, like the old adage of a frog letting itself boil to death if the heat increases slowly enough, it’s been proven to be incorrect.
So I think we as a society need to come up with better, more accurate word or term for something with an actual, verified bad memory instead of so often using an old reference that doesn’t make sense to use any more.
Or maybe there’s already a quippy German word for something that specific, as it seems there often is.
Let’s see…
…
… okay, so it turns out that the German translation of “bad memory” is “schlechtes Gedächtnis”.
Huh.
All right, let’s put a pin in that one and look for other ideas.
Anyone got any suggestions?