I have a terrible memory. At moments it seems almost impossible to be able to remember the right things, to keep a well ordered sequence of events in mind when trying to do things and remember facts, figures and events at the appropriate moment.
It drives me nuts occasionally, quite often a piece of information is at the tip of my tongue, or that I know that I know it but just can't retrieve it in a meaningful way. I forget things that are said to me, can't remember phone calls made earlier in the day, see faces and people I should know but can't place for whatever reason.
The strange thing is, it hasn't always been so. Many events that happened ten, twenty or even forty years ago are still crystal clear in my mind, I see faces and expressions, hear voices and intonations, remember conversations word for word, still know probably every bit of trivia and whatever else learned at school, up to and including precipitation rates in the tropical rainforests of the Amazon and partial differentials, a detailed history of the Weimar Republic and the conjugation of most irregular French verbs I'll ever have the pleasure of meeting. Half the time I just don't have clue what even happened yesterday.
I guess this is where lists come in handy once again, at least as far as practicable. I keep up a diary nowadays, just to keep track of what I'm supposed to be doing and what I've agreed to previously. The daily lists I mentioned yesterday are also very helpful, things needing doing get written down before the fog descends and makes them disappear. Conversations are a little more difficult, when possible I often make notes to keep track of what's being said although this isn't always a realistic option. The same goes for telephone calls. When sombody calls, I make a note of who called, when and for whom if necessary. That way I don't lose track of things that happen in the course of the day.
All I need to do is remember where I've left my pen and notepad. Sigh...
My short term memory is a mess and it annoys me greatly. It was a great surprise when, during my treatment period, a friend told me that the mind operates like a muscle in some ways, if it's not used or trained properly it ends up flabby and not able to operate in a useful way. If we don't exercise our bodies enough after all our dietary intake, we end up getting fat, lethargic and weak. If we don't exercise our minds enough to be able to process all the information and impulses fed to it in the course of a day, the brain becomes less able to retain and retrieve the necessary information, becomes "soft" and lethargic, leaving one feeling like they are trying to find anything and everything in an ever-present fog.
What to do? This one is difficult because a mind is of a totally different nature than the rest of our bodies. Apparently it can be done though, according to what I've been reading and been told. Some of the exercises that can performed are done through the games we might have played as children, in which we learned the basic techniques for acquiring and reproducing information.
One of these is a game called "Memory" which (in our case) consists of 72 cards laid out on the table, each card appearing twice in the whole set. The players turn the cards over to try to find the matching sets, if they do so they with that set and get another round otherwise it's the other players turn. The trick is to remember which cards are turned and where they are so that you can find matching pairs as quickly as possible later in the game.
Another game is a kind of puzzle in which you need to connect four tokens in a row in a strategic battle with your opponent, called... eh, Connect Four in English I think. I used to be quite good at this but have slipped in recent years. The message was forcibly brought home at the clinic when I played the game with somebody who'd never played it before but who managed to beat me every time after she'd understood how the game worked. Slightly frustrating, but nevertheless a signal for me that I should be getting my act together. Incidentally, I remember playing a three-dimensional version as a teenager which was difficult but excellent fun.
Crossword puzzles are an option although I'm not particularly fond of these since some I've done seem to be sadly mediocre with all sorts of strange, contrived words to fill in the occasional gaps. They do help my linguistic skills though, letting me learn new associations, connections and shades of meaning which are useful in daily life.
There are all sorts of games I'd like to try or improve, some of which I haven't done for years. I used to be fairly good at chess but haven't played in a serious way for many years now. Draughts is a game I've never understood all that well and is perhaps worth the effort of investigating some time in the future. Both of these are useful to develop skills in analysing situations and planning strategies as well. One of the most interesting though, which I'll try to tackle at a later stage is Rubik's cube which Middle Daughter has more or less mastered in the last month or two.
During the last month I've been trying different games to exercise my brain and get my mind sharpened up again. I've also been doing a lot of writing and simply analysing myself on paper, trying to describe the feelings which overcome me, trying to discover what the trigger was and the accompanying thoughts, allowing me to analyse my own ways of reacting to different situations. This is probably the most difficult of all since the first hurdle to be taken is identify feelings and sensations that have become second nature and hardly warrant a second thought.
All this is still fairly straightforward at the moment, as I'm still at home, life is reasonably predictible, I have good overview of what's going on and I'm more or less in control of my own doings. There's not all that much pressure on me at the moment, which I otherwise would be experiencing every day at work and which would be clouding my grip on my own life. Not that there's really all that much wrong with pressure, I can handle that too if I manage to keep control of what I'm doing or supposed to be doing.
There has been a definite improvement in my mental state during the last month, but there is still such a long way to go. In the same way I've managed to shed many kilogrammes of extra weight during the last two years and get my body physically back into shape during the last nine months, I'll probably be looking at a somewhat longish timeframe for improving my mental condition. Naturopathic medication is helping, the time-out I'm experiencing right now is genuinely beneficial, learning to focus my mind on issues of importance and reestablishing a sense of harmony between my body and my mind are all leading me forward to a future which I know will be better, despite a number of storms which are still looming on the horizon.
As they say, "nothing ventured, nothing gained" so I'm taking the time now to go and tackle a Minotaur or two today.
Keep well...
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