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.