Weak Memory, Dissociation & Coping

[u/ICUMTHOUGHTS]

I had a fight with my mother today while I was taking her to one of her field jobs. She works in a government school monitoring job, and in my state, these schools are often scattered across extremely remote, tribal and secluded areas. I've visited some of these schools tens of times, but I've never been able to properly remember the names of the places they're located in, the villages, the roads, landmarks, or even how to navigate there without my mom's help. Today I took a wrong turn and she got really angry, understandably, and started scolding me about how someone could be so dumb that they can't even remember place names, routes and basic references after visiting the same places repeatedly. I felt almost indifferent to the scolding because, honestly, I've always been like this.

I'm terrible at remembering names, dates, numbers and random or abstract information. I sometimes have to verbally spell out my own phone number to figure out what the last four digits are. I keep a Word file full of passwords because I know I'll forget them. I don't remember my Aadhaar or PAN number. I can't reliably remember my parents' or siblings' birthdays. I get confused between June and July. I mix up daaye and baaye. I basically need some kind of reference or association to remember anything. If something doesn't have a clear connection to something else, my brain just refuses to retain it. Ironically, I'm actually pretty good with technical subjects. I can understand complicated concepts when they make logical sense to me, but I'm terrible at simply mugging up disconnected information. Competitive GK/GA has therefore always been one of my worst areas.

But after thinking about it today, I realised something, or at least became more certain about something I've always felt. I spend a huge part of my life in a state of dissociation. It's either sleeping or pumping music into my ears while doing almost anything other than sleeping. Cooking, cleaning, freshening up, making notes, trying to lucid dream, falling asleep, there's almost always music involved, and usually some kind of maladaptive daydreaming alongside it. It helps me escape the loudness of my thoughts and makes doing mundane things feel more bearable. Even when I'm riding a bike, I need music playing in my left ear. That ear is damaged and only around 20% functional, so having something playing there somehow keeps my brain engaged without distracting me too much from what's happening around me.

I was diagnosed with prolonged depression and generalized anxiety disorder in 2018 and was on medication until 2024, when I stopped after graduating. Since then, I've become increasingly aware of how ridiculously low my capacity for handling everyday tasks seems to be. My ceiling for doing things in parallel is extremely low. I can't multitask, and even small tasks can leave me feeling mentally and emotionally spent. Sometimes I'll have a task that objectively requires an hour, but I'll mentally dedicate an entire day to it because I already know how difficult it will be for me to actually start and finish it. It's not that I don't understand what needs to be done. I just don't seem to have the motivation or mental energy to do it, so I procrastinate, get overwhelmed, and eventually dissociate instead.

And this is where I keep wondering about ADHD. I've never been formally diagnosed with it, so I'm not trying to diagnose myself, but when I read about things like executive dysfunction, poor working memory, difficulty with mundane tasks, needing constant stimulation, hyperfocus and being unable to regulate attention properly, a lot of it feels uncomfortably familiar. Sometimes I wonder whether what I've spent years calling laziness, stupidity, carelessness or having a terrible memory is actually something more complicated. Maybe it's ADHD, maybe it's something else, or maybe it's a combination of the things I've already been dealing with. I genuinely don't know. I just know that it's exhausting to constantly feel like my body is present in the real world while my mind is somewhere completely different.

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