Starting over

 It has been a while since I have posted on this blog about remembering every day that passes.

As I have described in previous posts, the system of reviewing the memory tags pinned to my mental calendar became unsustainable after about ten years. It became harder to refresh the images.

Perhaps if I was more adept at standard memorising techniques, of the sort that enable people to memorise sequences of playing cards or the digits if pi, I would have been able to keep going indefinitely.

However, I found as I passed over days where the images did not come easily to mind, I became increasingly demoralised and reluctant to try. Efforts to recapture the images by retrospectively filling diaries or filling phone apps with photos I had taken did not provide a solution.

And so I had to admit that, for me, my limit was ten years.

But I had gained so much from this process, I decided I would simply start again.

I took that decision on 01 June 2023. 

Following the same processes I have developed and described in this blog, I have been adding an image to each day since then as a memory tag. I refresh them in the same way as before. The numbers are manageable. All being equal, I should be able to keep this up for a total of ten years.

At the start of each month, I do range back over my mental calendar, starting in 2012, the first full year in this process. Those images are well entrenched and I can bring most of them back when I try. In the intervening years, I can at least orientate myself by significant periods or events, even if the images for many days have faded from my mental eye. 

It is more recent years where the blanks predominate, as the reviewing process buckled under its own weight. At least until 01 June 2023. Then I am back with fully populated calendars.

A week at a time

 In my ten-year update on this process of remembering every day that passes, I described the recall procedure I used to refresh the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags.

I changed approach in July.

I now aim to recall a week from each of the past ten years, encompassing the current date.

I have learned that dates 10 years ago are two days later. In other words, today is Monday, 19 September 2022, so I begin by looking back to the week of Monday, 17 September 2012 and run through the images for every day of that week.

The pattern as I move on a year, is the date decreases by one, so:

Monday, 16 September 2013

Monday, 15 September 2014

Monday, 14 September 2015

Then drop two days for the leap year, so Monday, 12 September 2016, but as this doesn't include the present date, I move on a week.

Monday 19 September 2016 (the same date as today, making a quick reference point).

Monday 18 September 2017

Monday 17 September 2018

Monday 16 September 2019

Another leap year.

Monday 14 September 2020

Monday 13 September 2021

Which brings me to last week, Monday 12 September 2022.

The beauty of this system is I review these seven-day windows seven times, so have time to search around for any missing images. I also have a longer context to help me remember what was going on in my life.

It is also generally possible to complete these historic reviews before I get up. 

This gives me sufficient time to complete a current review of the past month and a selection of days from the past 6 months or so (I currently go back to January considering a two or three-day window).

The great disadvantage is I'm not reviewing other images from the past ten years and I won't return to these images until next September.

That's an enormous gap.

Previously, I found that I really needed to refresh images once per month for them to be easy to recall. But there are now too many and I was overwhelmed. I have tried to come up with some method to bring in other days to a daily routine, but nothing has worked so far.

The good news is that I am generally able to recall most or many images for the more distant years, having refreshed them so many times. I struggle with the recent years of 2020 and 2021, particularly as much of this time was constrained by lockdowns and I might have only captured a detail such as an old friend I called up, a film I watched, or an online course I completed. Events were simply less memorable.

However, I don't know how long the more established images will last if I'm only recalling them during one week per year, instead of once per month, as at the outset.

I don't want to admit defeat and let them go, but gaps are appearing. I sometimes resort to looking back through photos as a reminder and have even considered digging out the diaries I wrote retrospectively several years into this process.

As I've mentioned, I now make a daily entry in a diary with a memory tag at the top of the page. I do sometimes have to look back through the current diary as it is always the recent tags that have been most elusive, until they have been sufficiently reinforced. Given the difficulties I have with 2020 and 2021, I am trying harder to embed this year.

I had hoped this process would trigger hyperthymesia, the ability a very small number of people have to remember every day without memory tricks. It hasn't, so I need the tricks.

Routinely recalling where I was and what I was doing in past years continues to be immensely satisfying for all the reasons I've addressed before. And being able to recall events is also very impressive to many friends and relatives who struggle to place them.

Ten years of remembering every day that passes

I began this process on 17 December 2011 and let the tenth anniversary pass without comment, so the time has come to reflect.

Firstly, I continue with this process. Every day I record a memory tag on my mental calendar and regularly review past days.

My current review process is to go through a month at a time per year. I'm currently on the month of September, remembering consecutive days of each month from 2012. It continues to be enriching. I would not have thought of many or even most of the events covered, but for this process. Indeed, I rarely recall events from the years prior to 2012 and have few landmarks for them.

The passage of time continues to surprise me. The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective on them changes. Remembering every day gives me appreciation of how much happens in a year, yet I also feel the relentlessness of time's passing.

I have no intention to stop, but it has inevitably become harder to refresh the memory tags on my mental calendar. When this was easiest, I was recalling each image at least once per month. With approaching 4000 images, I need to get through 3 months per day. That rarely happens as my discipline has waned and I've let things slide when I've struggled to remember tags. Other times, an image may distract me to recall other events of the day or associated days.

Over the years, my review process has adapted as the days have piled up. My current approach to cope is not to obsess if tags elude me, but to go through what I can in the hope that missing tags will appear next time around. It is often the case that recalling subsequent months or years will suddenly unlock other tags. They are still there.

For many years, I wrote nothing down, though sometimes I might have to look back through photos or other records to find out what I was doing on a particular day where the memory tag alluded more. Prior to this process, I kept a diary and a few years ago I caught up with it, writing entries from years before retrospectively based on my memory tags.

More recently, I've kept a diary as I go, recording significant events and identifying the memory tag at the top of the page. This is not a substitute for my mental calendar, but it helps me to reinforce the memory tags during the early weeks.

It's always been the case that most recent tags are most elusive because I have spent less time reinforcing them. I've learned that I need to regularly refresh the tags by calling them to mind. What worked best was running through every day of the past month and a couple of days per month of the preceding 6 months, then selected periods of earlier years.

Often these days, I don't even complete the daily review of even the last month and so have to resort to the diary to fill in blanks. Occasionally, I'll look further back, but generally the diary is for these more recent days.

Another pressure on my time to remember is I'm using my brain for other purposes. My New Year's Resolution in 2019 was to learn the piano. Key to success is building mental representations of music and the keyboard. Increasingly, I do this by playing pieces on my mental piano, which now competes with my mental calendar for my attention.

But I'm not giving up. I am increasingly grateful for memories of times that have gone and the people who are no longer with us. 

Relatives and friends who have passed away. 

My mother's decline into Alzheimer's, which has wiped us from her memory. And put her into a care home when she became terrified of the strangers keeping her in a strange house. 

For a while she believed the care home was her childhood home and she had just come in for a rest from helping her father in the garden. Now those memories appear to have gone too, and though she is friendly when we visit, barely communicates. She smiles at us, but for the warmth of human contact, not recognition.

This shows me the fragility of our brains, that our memories are essential for our relationships, but that we are also more than our memories. Aspects of our personalities reside at a deeper level.

Sometimes, I wonder if there is something to be gained from letting these days go. It is normal to forget. 

Yet, I can see no advantage. The great benefit of this process, even as I struggle with it, is it gives me a rounded view of my life. 

The few memories I have from the years before sometimes taunt me with my failings and are missing the perspective given by putting isolated incidents into their surrounding context. 

So, I will continue to remember every day that passes, as best I can, and continue to be amazed by what it is to live a life.

To those giving this a try

It's great to see comments from people who have been inspired by this blog to try their own experiment in remembering every day that passes. 

People sometimes suggest different approaches - everyone has to find what works for them, which will probably change over time as the days pile up.

I have just replied to a recent comment as follows:

Thank you for your comment. Please keep us updated on how your approach works.

When I began - nearly 10 years ago now - I had the hope that this process might develop hyperthymesia, the ability a very small number of people have to remember every day without memory tricks.

That hasn't happened, but I continue. It is still rewarding - if not more so with the memory tags that have been reinforced stretching back 10 years.

Though it takes some time to do the reviews, it is only a small fraction of my day and I am certain it is beneficial to my mental health to think about this wide range of experiences, not just those that come to my mind unbidden.

Writing things down

For a long time while following the process of remembering every day that passes, I had a policy of not keeping a diary and not making notes. I thought it would be good for my discipline to rely on my memory alone. 

True, I would sometimes have to look through photos on my phone or emails with travel details to help me recover the images for particular days if I got stuck, but generally the mental process alone worked.

Prior to starting this journey, I had been a good journal keeper, not writing every day, but filling in the gaps whenever I picked it up. A few years in, I wrote my missing journals retrospectively, using the recollections my memory tags gave me.

Then in 2017, when my mother's Alzheimer's progressed to the point where I returned home to help my father and sister care for her, until that was no longer possible at home, I began to keep a diary of what was happening. The purpose was to learn what did and did not work in responding to her fears when she did not know us - and did not believe that she had a husband and children - and was scared of strangers in her house.

I have kept that going and write at the top of each page a prompt for the image for my memory tag.

This has had a downside. This year, I have fallen out of the habit of reinforcing the tags for the recent month with a review morning and night, and selected days from the past 6 months. I've told myself I can pick up my diary and catch up. To some extent that has worked, but it is not as effective as when I stuck to my routine.

It means it is somewhat harder to recall every day of recent months than the days from 2012, my first full year of this process. Yet, I suspect without the diaries, I would be lost by now.

Forgetting remembering

 I continue with this process of remembering every day that passes. I am coming up to ten years now.

However, it is getting harder to get through the review process and sometimes hitting blanks demotivates me from trying. But then, I'll have a good run or a particular day will be very important to me for the memories it brings or the fresh associations that arise.

Something I have noticed is that I no longer have the memory of my last run through to help me. For a long, long time, whenever I ran through the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags for each day, I would have a sense of when I last did so. If there was a day that gave me a problem, I may well recall how I recovered the tag the previous time.

Now, my process is not so routine. I don't even have a clear idea of how long it takes me to go through the tags for the past 10 years now. At present, I am going through January to December for each year, but stepping back a year each time. I'm currently mid-way through 2018, which was a important year for me as it was when my mother's Alzheimer's reached a critical stage where she no longer felt safe at home because she did not know who we were and was scared of her husband and me being in her house.

In the sessions before this, I ran through the same month of each year. In doing so, I found it was the more recent years that gave me most problems, hence giving those more attention now.

Getting through the years

 I completed a full review of my mental calendar from 17 December 2011 in December, taking a month and reviewing the images pinned to each day as memory tags for subsequent years. This brought me up to date.

There were blanks, some of which I was able to complete as subsequent years or months triggered associations. The earliest years were the easiest to complete as I have reviewed them so many times already.

January has just finished and I completed as far as the end of October. Accordingly, I've started February by running through November, December and January tags. I have 12 x 9 years = 108 months to cover, so need to cover about 4 months per day.

I will keep to the three-month window. It will have advantages as I was finding when I picked up on each month that I might have to scan the preceding month to orientate myself.

I changed the review of the past 12 months in January to make it more manageable. I had been reviewing two days per week for the whole year. Moving this window on a day at a time, so there would be overlap. To save time, I did 6 months at a time, dispensing with the overlap. So one day, Monday and Tuesday for January to June, the next Tuesday and Wednesday for July to December, then Wednesday and Thursday for January to June, etc. This half the time.

Again, it is the more recent days that are harder to track down, but I now keep a diary and note the memory tags at the top of the page, so can flip through that to remind myself. This is a practice I'm following only for the last month or so of images, as after that they are generally entrenched enough. It's a crutch, but now necessary and does not negate from the benefits I gain from the mental reviews of every day of the past 9 years.