Friday, April 13, 2007

Memory

It's been a while.

Now that I've given you a full and extensive account for why I've not written anything for many months, let me get on to my topic of the day; Memory. As it happens, I've done a lot of various memory tests during the last year, and I seem to be getting very high marks on all of them. Yet my psychologists seem to think I have ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and I'm finding myself rather agreeing with much of the criteria for the diagnosis. The problem is, how does the attention deficit come across in a person with a very good short term memory? Does this mean that my memory would be off the scale if I didn't have ADHD? Or have I learned not to pay attention because I can cope without doing so? What I do know is that it's probably affected my ability to organize myself. I've never kept a calender or a schedule, simply relying on my good memory to get me where I need to be. Yet as I've grown older there's less structured imposed on my life from the outside, and as a result my days are now wasted doing whatever grabs my attention. I keep forgetting things and I'm constantly late for everything(not that this is anything new, I've always been known to show up 5-30mins late for classes or any other agreed upon meetings).

You might have noticed my writing is often rather unstructured, and can easily go off on a tangent and never find its way back again. In fact, I still do a lot of my "writing" in my head. I start spinning out a story or an blog entry or the likes in my head, choosing my wording and working my way through what I want to get said. However, now that I'm trying to write down the story that I had in my head, I find myself getting distracted, and I no longer remember what it was I wanted to say, nor all the really good points that I wanted to address. This is the main reason I prefer a written medium, and despise speaking in public. You see I have a tendency to narrate what I want to say or write, and as such other people talking tends to get in the way of my own thinking. I also like to take my time and formulate what I want to say. The internet and the written communication lets me just this, helping to hide all my distractions.

Why did I just write that? The hell if I'd know.