People don’t realize how bad my memory tends to be. Sure, a lot of people say that they don’t have good short-term memory, but mine is bad. And no, it’s not that I am too lazy to remember, like most think the case is (I swear, the number of times that I have heard “if you just try hard enough you can remember” or “why don’t you just remember it?”). I cannot just try to remember things; if they’re gone, then they are gone.

It’s even hard for me to remember a lot of things in long-term. By this, I don’t mean to say that I can’t remember things from when I was a child. I can definitely remember certain events that happened when I was a child and things, it’s just that for the most part, it is difficult to remember something from a long time ago without it being significant in some way to me. In other words, it is also very difficult for me to remember a memory that I am being asked for. This horrible memory of mine has caused me to develop a handful of habits over the years to combat it.

It started with my Google Drive. I have a pretty large collection of documents on my Google Drive. I could even go as far as saying that my Google Drive encompasses a lot of the second half of my life, from middle school onwards. Nearly everything that I have written in the past of importance, like my stories (the embarrassing, the long, and the embarrassingly long). Beyond fiction, I also have documents with lists of things to remember to read and watch (tv shows, books, anime, manga, etc.), lists of songs to give writing inspiration, a list of songs I frequently like to play on the piano (for when I don’t remember what I usually like to play each time I sit on the piano bench), and lists of websites that I wanted to remember for whatever reasons, like art websites for writing inspiration. I came to recognize a pattern of not being able to remember a fun fact about me every time there was an icebreaker game so I wrote up a list for that that I add to when I remember something new. I also have a real dream journal. Taking a look through my entire Google Drive could easily show what interests and passions I had from 2011 to the present.

Then on my phone, we have the notes app. I used to constantly whip out my phone and type in notes to self when I remember that I need to do something later on. Unfortunately, this eventually backfired when I failed to remember to actually open the notes app to check what reminders I had. I only saw this flaw once I realized that I was forgetting to do things again.

These next habits are the ones people tend to find the oddest. Instead of the notes, I switched to using the Safari app on my phone instead. Each time I needed to write down a reminder I would open a new tab in safari and type in the reminder, then click enter. That way, whenever I go onto the app I would constantly see the reminder tab(s). And this worked with much more success, as I visit safari infinitely more often than I do the notes. Similarly, I do this with my computer. I open a new tab on Chrome to jot down a reminder in the search bar before I click enter. I have to click enter, even though the search results come up funny, because otherwise if I have to close a window because of slow responding, the tab gets saved in ‘recently closed’ for me to reopen it. So sometimes when my computer shuts down unexpectedly and doesn’t restore the tabs I have previously, I die a little inside (sometimes I try to then work around this by saving bookmarks of my tabs when I think it may shut down soon).

So yes, my memory is straight up terrible. But I have worked hard to find ways to go around it and it has worked for me (thus far). Sometimes, the solution isn’t to simply overcome it, but to find ways to counter it.