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Tuesday 16 September 2014

Deflated

My system for remembering every day that passes suffered total collapse last week. I was drawing blanks for almost the whole of the last month and felt bereft. It was as if a balloon had become deflated and I could not pump it up again.

It happened because I spent five intense days working. I had little sleep and had too much to do. I struggled to conduct my usual six-month review in the morning. The longer review process covering the memory tags going back to 2011 went neglected. I was faced with recalling not just one day per month, but then two, three and four just to keep up.

Everything is back on track again now. Tomorrow I'll explain the method I used for a memory reboot covering the longer period.

The more immediate past, usually so familiar, had become a foreign country. A change of scene or situation does give me a new perspective on past days, but this experience made them seem so alien I could barely grasp them.

The solution was perseverance. I had to put aside feelings of panic as day after day of my mental calendar hissed with the white static of forgotten. There were a few days with images and slowly these triggered associations. All the techniques I have developed to recover lost memories came into play and after four days of struggle during spare moments (I have still been very busy), the tags were back.

The memory reboot method I was using for the longer timespan, which I will explain tomorrow, no doubt also helped bring my memory muscles back into shape.

The deflated balloon of my memory began to inflate. In fact, it felt more like inflating an airbed with a foot pump, so slowly did it unfold itself and return to shape. Images that troubled me as incomplete gained their missing aspects and another crinkle popped away.

For a moment, when the immediate month just passed was a mess of missing and confused images, I thought this process had come to its natural end.

This morning I have done my usual six-month run through and all is well again.

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