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Memory Lapses

I am creative.  I am powerful.  I am woman, hear me roar.  I am also just a tad forgetful.  Like “forget what I had for breakfast while the fork is still in my hand” forgetful.  I need to document my thoughts while I am out and about or they will be forever forgotten in the vast jungle of my mind.

What do you do if your mind is a sieve?  If you’re anything like me, you send notes via text to yourself to remember ideas, appointments, and events.  If it’s not written down, I can forget a thought quicker than anyone else I know.  I was going to suggest an Olympic Sport called Speed Forgetting, but I forgot to mail the letter.

Yesterday evening, I was looking through my text messages for something and came across this message I sent myself over a week ago.  Check this out:

“The eyes are the windows to the soul. Sometimes they reflect a vision of hell.”

Wow.  What a deep thought.  What a great lead in to an unforgettable blog post.

Too bad I cannot recall for the life of me what I was thinking when I wrote it.  Or where I was, or what I was doing.

This cryptic line seems to be the beginning of a wonderful biopic journal of my life’s journey.  It is a cool line for the first sentence of a horror story.  It could have been what I thought when I woke up one morning and saw bags and dark circles under my eyes after spending a sleepless night trying to remember my Great-Grandmother’s middle name.

I have absolutely no idea why I sent that to myself. At all. Was it because of an instance of animal cruelty that I’ve seen? People suck, I’ve said that often…because they do, and it’s very possible that an incident of animal cruelty prompted that comment to myself. It’s equally possible that the stories about school shootings or perhaps a news story of a child abuse victim or domestic abuse victim set me off.  Or, the amazing line could have come to me as I was watching a poor retailer slog through a transaction with a customer who was acting like a complete asshole, or a woman who realized she was wearing white after Labor Day.

The world may never know.

The way my swiss cheese brain works is a mystery, even to myself.  There are just so many versions of hell, and everyone you meet everywhere has their own personal hell.  For some, hell might be driving to work.  Someone else’s hell may be dealing with their cable company (and I suspect the cable guy has a few versions of hell as well).  The upper class may think it is hell dealing with the butler, and the butler sure as heck knows it’s hell dealing with his snobby boss.  The lower class sees the hell of poverty and sadness every day, and the middle class thinks it is hell to have to pay taxes to help the poor through that particular hell. A child thinks hell is when school is not cancelled for a snow day; the teachers probably agree with that version of hell and the parents may, too. Hell is not being able to use that amazing word in Words with Friends that you really want to use, or my personal favorite, forgetting why I walked into a room.

So many meanings of hell.  So many possible reasons for my amazingly creative phrase.  Such a shame to have such severe short term…and long term, apparently…memory loss that I cannot recall the moment this profound statement was imagined.

Think about it.  “The eyes are the windows to the soul. Sometimes they reflect a vision of hell.”  I want you to consider this phrase carefully.  I want you to ponder it deeply.  Repeat it over and over.

And then, can you please tell me what the hell I was thinking!?

12 thoughts on “Memory Lapses”

  3. I used to leave messages for myself way back in the days before smart phones and the internet. It didn’t work then and doesn’t work any better with modern technology.

    My first attempts were writing notes on bits of paper and putting them in my wallet or pocket. Of course sometimes I wouldn’t find them for weeks, by which time the info in them was irrelevant. Or like as you describe, the note was too cryptic to decipher a few hours later. The other problem is that both my wallet and pockets have a secret entrance to another dimension as more than half of what goes into them simply disappears without trace.

    I tried keeping a pocket diary instead of using bits of paper, but it didn’t solve the problem of cryptic messages, and I tended to misplace the thing several times a day, and invariably they’d permanently disappear into that other dimension after a few weeks.

    I did try using a note-taking app on my smart phone, but it wasn’t any more successful than the good old pencil and paper. So now I just don’t bother.

    • I think your wallet has infected my entire house, because this place is the Bermuda Triangle sometimes. LOL

      A friend of mine uses “bullet journaling” and I tried that, but I guess my ADD kicked in because, for the life of me, I just could not stick with it.

    • Oh no! Not at all! I love your blog! You speak so eloquently and it always makes one think, yet it’s down to earth and everything is so relatable. I do need to do better about keeping up on my reading though so I’m not doing it all at once.

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