Vent about memories. Tw for memory loss, depersonalisation mentions, unreality. Mild cw for swearing. Would like advice if anyone sees this. <3
My memory issues are really, really bad and nobody else seems to worry about them. My mother says its due to adhd, my therapist says its adhd and depression, and my sister says that it’s very not normal and I should seek help. I am leaning more toward my sister’s opinion: I know what depressive forgetting and adhd forgetting feel like and these symptoms sure as hell don’t feel the same.
I’ve dealt with this bullshit for as long as I can remember. The issues come in three major ways: I can’t remember shit about my childhood, my daily life, and sometimes entire chunks of time are just gone. My childhood is the least concerning to me, since I don’t particularly want to relive it. Any memories I do have are fleeting, or I can only recall them when I’m in a certain headspace. It takes a lot of concentration for me to get a memory to come up for me too. I can ‘remember’ stories from my childhood, but it’s hard to tell if they’re real memories or just stories I’ve heard from other people. Besides those, my memory pretty much starts at 11-13. I look at photos of child me and I don’t realise it’s me until I get told so.
Remembering everyday things is mostly adhd but like, on steroids. I know what happens to me on a daily basis, as in, I can tell you I did x and then y and then z. But anything more than that? I can’t do it. No specific conversation details, no knowledge of completing assignments that I find completed and shoved in my backpack, I’ll know I ate but I won’t know what. I’ll come to in school and my mind will be like “oh fuck it’s school” and then my brain will make windows start-up noises as I get secondhand context to whatever the hell is going on.
The worst though are the blackouts. I lost a complete day pretty recently, and the only evidence I have of that day even existing is a shitty photo of what I assume was my breakfast or lunch. I wasn’t stressed, I had nothing bad happen recently, everything just went dark that day.
Some things I can defintely chalk up to adhd/depression though. When I’m zoning out because of adhd I’ll realise “oh I’m zoning out” and when I’m blinded to time I’ll remember what happened during the duration, even if it seemed really fast or slow. My depression makes my memories foggy but it doesn’t take too long for those to be cleared up if I concentrate. And when I try to remember depression memories, it’s more like a damn memory than a bored narrator telling me what the hell happened in my life like some of my “odd moments”, as I like to call them, do.