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.

Now I know what this is all about

I began this process of remembering every day that passes over 3000 days ago.

I continue to pin an image to my mental calendar at the end of every day as a memory tag.

But as I've been recording here, it has become increasingly harder to refresh the images.

Several times I've thought of giving it up as an experiment that has reached its natural end.

But I haven't. During the current coronavirus pandemic lockdown, the memory tags mean I can distinguish between days with few distinguishing features and mark the passage of time. Otherwise they would just be a blur.

More importantly, I've now realised what this process is all about.

I had hoped it would induce hyperthymesia, a rare ability to access all memories as if they are fresh. That hasn't happened. It seems that I need to review the images pinned to my mental calendar once per month to be able to remember them easily next time around. It's a memory exercise. It hasn't rewired my brain to make recall effortless.

Now there are too many days to run through all the images on that timescale, even though the process I use has evolved over time. My current method is to run through a year of memories over the course of a week or more. There are now approaching 9 years to cover.

I was becoming frustrated because sometimes I'd hit blanks and either take a break for a few days or jump ahead and hope I could come back and fill in the blanks - which generally does work.

Yet, as the reviews have taken longer, the monthly target of reviewing each image has become a forlorn hope and I face the prospect of each review being harder every time and blank days appearing and joining up into voids in my memory.

Just like the years before I began this process, where the reference points are few and far between.

But it struck me as I was recalling images of my mother, now in the later stage of Alzheimer's where she no longer remember me or her husband of 62 years, that this experiment was always about remembering.

Remembering the days I have lived. The people I love. The experiences we have shared. The places we have been.

I've currently been progressing through 2016. Before my mother's illness was bad, but when there were signs of it. Those signs are more poignant now. The times of normality and happiness more precious. Revisiting the past continues to be enriching as I see it differently as my vantage point changes and its impact on the present also changes.

Going through these memory tags in the past few days, it struck me that this is no longer principally to refresh the images for my memory trick. I am going to stop worrying that it's taking far longer than a month to complete the cycle. That pressure is off.

I'll finish this year in the time it takes. Then move onto the next in the same way. But without pressure to hit some target of weeks or months covered in each period.

It is only the recent days where discipline is required to establish the images.

I am savouring remembering. Filling in most of the blanks. Sometimes resorting to looking back at pictures on my phone - which is not cheating, as I set the rule. A photograph can orientate me and suddenly unlock a whole sequence of memories.

Even as some images slip away from me, the memories of these years are far richer than the previous decades of my life. And I will continue to add my memory tag for each day.

This was always about remembering.

Brain chemicals

Remembering every day that passes continues to be part of my routine.

To stop the days for nearly eight years I've been doing this now from fading, I call up the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags. The techniques I used in the early months and years, as described in the "how I remember" posts can no longer cope with the volume. Instead of moving windows recalling images from a few days each week or month, I now run sequentially through the days.

Sometimes I start with 17 December 2011 and work forwards. Sometimes I'll complete the current year and then each previous year. Sometimes a year here, and a year there.

Generally at some point of the month, I'll recall the images for the same month of each year, for the perspective on my life it brings me. It's now October. It's interesting to know what I was doing for every day of each October from 2012 to the present year.

Sometimes I can rattle through a period of days or weeks in seconds. Other times, I'm stuck and may have to range ahead until I find an image to anchor me and then can try to fill in the blanks.

There are two realisations this ever growing challenge to refresh the memory tags have brought.

Firstly, it seems recalling the images about once per month is about right to maintain easy recall. I know when a retrospective of the current month in past years strikes images I've recently remembered because they come so easily to mind. However, covering the whole eight-year period takes more than a month now and I fear it will become progressively more difficult.

And the longer it takes to find the images, the less I get done in the short snatches of time when I do this, and so the longer between recalls. It's a vicious circle. Previously such challenges have led me to find new refresh techniques. But I don't seem to have anywhere else to go now. It seems inevitable blanks will appear or I'll simply give up on the recall procedure.

The second realisation is that there is something going on in my brain that determines how easy it is to recall images.

I sometimes find I am struggling to fill the blanks in a month and so put it aside and get on with something else or move on to the next period. But then I'll come back again and suddenly the images all pop into place (I can remember the point I had reached in the refresh process from the wave front of clear images).

It may be that a specific memory tag orientates me and triggers other recalls.

But other times it seems there is something else going on, as if the presence or lack of some brain chemicals makes all the difference.

It is worrying in a way that my ability to recall varies like this. My mother has Alzheimer's and I see how her ability to connect varies throughout the day and from day to day. Might there be a link? Could this be an early symptom in me?

On the other hand, it could be down to my level of tiredness or blood sugar.

It's something I will continue to explore.

When were we here?

I often surprise family and friends these days when we visit somewhere and someone says, "When were we last here?"

On a recent trip to a café, I was able to reply, "October 17, 2013. It was a Thursday and we stopped here on the way to visit that place in the countryside."

I even remembered what we had eaten and that in our subsequent visit we had spent some time identifying trees. The trees are included in my memory tag for the day as a way to store the features I need to identify them in future.

I was with my parents on both trips. My mother is suffering memory loss, which is becoming progressively worse. She asked repeatedly if we had been to the café before, even though it is one we have visited many times over the years, though most of those visits are lost in the mists before I began this process of remembering every day that passes.

Eventually my mother stopped asking if we had been to the café before, but then started to say she had been to the café just a few weeks ago. Somehow she had now connected with a past memory, but could not place it in time.

It is sad to see my Mother's memory failing her like this. I wonder if I am destined to suffer the same way in my old age and whether this process will have any impact on what happens.

Hypochondria

Just because I might have a tendency to hypochondria does not mean I will never get ill.

And I cannot deny the symptoms logged in some of the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags.

My current concerns began on 11 February 2014, when tingling started in the thumb, index and middle finger of my left hand. I have long experience tingling in my face, but suddenly this was more pronounced, as if I am recovering from a dentist's injection and other times feels like I have been burned, and spread to my tongue, accompanied by a slight metallic taste.

Searching the internet suggests these are symptoms to have checked out. On 17 March I did register with a doctor with the intention to make an appointment, but have not yet done so. As a hypochondriac, I've become used to scaring myself, only to have my carefully monitored symptoms dismissed, sometimes after tests. Pains in my lower back were not signs of kidney disease, but probably exertion. Pains in my chest were not a heart attack, but a muscle spasm (intercostal neuralgia). The clicking vertebrae in my neck, which began 18 months ago and I sometimes fear may be behind these latest developments are nothing to worry about: many people experience the same.

More to the point, over a decade ago I experienced similar feelings of tingling skin on my arms and a clammy deadness in my legs and was checked out to the point of an MRI scan, that found nothing wrong. I feared at the time the commencement of a nervous disorder – in the darkest moments the dreaded MS that disabled and finally killed a brother-in-law. Nothing found and my worries faded, though the tingling cheeks I have experienced for as long as I can remember, never really left.

My recent internet research suggests possible other causes. Vitamin B12 deficiency is one, though I am not a vegetarian, even if I rarely eat red meat. I follow a fasting diet two days per week and have been stricter since Christmas and lost around 5 kg as a result. Perhaps that prompted a vitamin imbalance. Just in case, I started taking a vitamin supplement, also on 17 March.

Carpal tunnel syndrome could explain the tingling fingers. In a bizarre coincidence that seems like a cosmic joke, this came up in a telephone conversation with my father on 19 March when he told me he is booked for an MRI scan as he has been suffering from tingling fingers. He attributed this to carpal tunnel syndrome at first as my sister had been diagnosed with the same some years before (she was probably also beset with fears of the MS that took my brother-in-law). Then on 27 March a colleague at work mentioned she thought she was developing carpal tunnel syndrome ("Are your fingers tingling?" I asked, but she has aches in her wrists).

I do spend too long on the computer and both these symptoms and the clicking in my neck seem linked to the duration and levels of stress: if I work late into the night I know it.

There have been times when I have woken with both forearms and hands numb and I have started to wonder if this is computer related. As part of a life reassessment, I'm trying to keep work to set hours (though I am typing this early morning).

Whether from vitamin supplements, less typing or nervous disorder remission, the symptoms have diminished to slight tingling in my left thumb, index finger and middle finger, with the same tingling cheeks. Now I am in monitoring mode and my fears have started to recede. I have told no-one.

But there have been seem dark moments. My memory tag of 16 March is visiting a nature sanctuary with my wife. It had been a few years since we have visited and as we walked around I wondered if this would be the last opportunity – and so a moment to be savoured.

On 6 March I was running on an empty beach and decided to close my eyes, thinking of how life would be if I lost my sight.

On another run on 25 March, I ended up sitting on a bench at the top of a hill, feeling wonderfully healthy from the exertion and wondering if the symptoms were just another descent into hypochondria and not signs of my imminent demise.

It struck me that something will get me in the end. Like everyone around me I am ageing, day by day. Like everyone before me, I am mortal.

So run while I can, I thought, charging back down the hill.

My parents

My parents visited for the weekend. My father is 79 years old and drove the 180 miles to see us. He is very active, despite still suffering from injuries sustained as a child in the second world war. He is a writer and has embraced computers in recent years, which is particularly impressive given he does not use them intuitively but writes detailed notes for every procedure.

My mother is 72 and not as active as she used to be. Since we last saw her, she has taken to pushing a shopping trolley everywhere for support due to arthritis in her knees. She doses herself with pills and cider vinegar that are supposed to help, and gives herself electric shocks with a thumb operated device.

My mother has always been a talker, but tells her stories to so many relatives she has often repeated herself. It has struck me how my father doesn't really seem to notice this. For years they have had the habit of telling me the same stories time and again, as if for the first time, even on consecutive days when we are staying with them.

My mother's memory was noticeably worse this time. She asked perhaps twenty times if we had visited our friends in Seaton since we had arrived back in the country and if they were coming to see us.

While she is forgetting things, she also has false memories. She was convinced she had been with me in my car when someone crashed into the back of it two years ago. In retelling the story, she has placed herself at the scene.

Her spatial memory is being affected. She won't travel into town on her own anymore to visit the shops because she is worried she won't find her way home.

But she remembers more active times without rancour, reminding us as she pushes her trolley of our long walks on family holidays.