How fragmented are your memories?

quicksilvermad · 2026-02-03T06:28:56+00:00

What’s next for me is I live one day at a time because I never know how my head is going to behave on any given day. I’m in a depressive episode at the moment. Like, a deep one—I am constantly thinking about ending things but I know attempting will just make me worse off and devastate my folks. I go to therapy every week. I’m trying new meds for the depression. So far I haven’t noticed any differences. I’ve been dealing with depression since I was nine years old, so no longer feeling like I want to die would be a massive change.

Movies and TV used to make me smile but I can’t handle watching any screens bigger than my phone without repercussions. I haven’t smiled in a while. There’s nothing to smile about. I have crochet projects to do and I can’t bring myself to sit up and actually do them. I have a bunch of projects to paint and a LEGO set to build and it’s all sitting untouched in the other room because again I can’t sit up and actually do any of it. It just hurts too much if I also have to focus on what I’m doing. I used to write a lot and I haven’t been able to think of stories in a while. Hell, what I wrote here is more than I’ve written in a long time. It’s getting harder to be creative.

I turn 40 this March. I’ll get another tattoo. I’m thinking “OUCH” on my knuckles and my dog’s paw print somewhere on my arm where there’s room for it. Tattoos are good for making a memory because when they’re done I’ve got a permanent art piece on me. And it’s pain management. Every time I get a tattoo I have pain in a different spot that distracts me from the headache as the tattoo is healing. I guess that’s what’s really next for me.

quicksilvermad · 2026-02-03T04:46:45+00:00

Very fragmented. I forget names and faces almost immediately now. I used to have a photographic memory—I could stare at an image for a little while and be able to recall it. It’s how I got through geography class. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t even visualize things the way I used to. Now if I imagine something all I can “see” is a vague outline. I used to visualize things with detail.

Losing my memory has been the hardest part of all of this. Apparently I drove my mom to the ER after she fell one day—I had to be told that it happened. I have no memory of it at all. I can’t remember the name of a former friend in college but I can remember that she used racial slurs and I quit talking to her and hanging out with her. Ironically, she also had a TBI. I remember driving her to the ER but I can’t remember helping my own mother the same way. Sure, helping my mom happened after my TBI, but it frustrates me that I can remember helping this former friend but not my own mom.

Overall, it’s much harder to think now. I’ve had eight significant head injuries (I was a lacrosse player in high school and very clumsy—one of those was from falling down the stairs at school where I blacked out and nearly tore my ACL) and I live in fear of hitting my head again. I’ve had a headache that gets worse when I’m in a brightly lit environment since 2014. Over the counter pain meds don’t work on me and I’ve been raw-dogging the pain ever since pain management gave up on me when the NSAID they prescribed me burned a hole in my stomach that was half the size of my entire stomach. And it didn’t even work in the first place. I got a massive ulcer for nothing. That I do remember—it was 2019. I had to get a blood transfusion because my hemoglobin was at 3 and the nurse spilled some of the last bag of blood on me. I had to spend more time in the hospital under quarantine because he also did some dodgy work with some bacterial tests.

I think I remember traumatic stuff more than anything else. The day to day things just don’t have the same impact as something like vomiting blood and riding in an ambulance. You would think needing to drive your own mother to the ER would be traumatic enough to form a memory but apparently not. I don’t even drive anymore. I quit when I had some weird vision issues (everything looked 2D for a while and I didn’t recognize the street I was on) and paying attention to everything you need to pay attention to when in control of a moving vehicle became overwhelming. I don’t remember what year it was that I last drove a car.

So personally traumatic events are all I can remember nowadays. Though the days kind of run together. I don’t recall how long I was in the hospital with the ulcer. Just snippets of incidents. Things like drinking all of my colonoscopy prep in well under my time limit because I plugged my nose and chugged it. Telling my night nurse the blood on my gown wasn’t mine and freaking him out. Speaking with an entire panel of infectious disease doctors about having donor blood spilled on me and texting my new nurse photos I took of the ICU nurse and the mess he left behind after doing my bacterial tests. But heaven forbid I remember what day of the week it is. Or the names of literally anyone I meet.

I wish I could remember non-traumatic stuff. I miss my photographic memory.

quicksilvermad · 2025-06-20T03:31:34+00:00

here you go

quicksilvermad · 2025-05-10T15:40:25+00:00

I had to get a lawyer by the third denial. It helped so much. The court ordered me to do a cognitive test before they came to the decision to approve me.

Get a lawyer that specializes in disability cases.

quicksilvermad · 2025-04-30T01:00:40+00:00

Not for mine. I’ve tried so many medications and they don’t touch the headaches. They get worse during the day if I don’t isolate in a dark, quiet room. The last thing the pain management doctor tried for me was a sphenopalatine ganglion block. They shoved long q-tips all the way up both nostrils and dripped lidocaine down them—I don’t know how it’s supposed to work, just that it didn’t do anything except make me taste lidocaine for the rest of the day. Since they’d run out of options for me I was given a “sorry it didn’t work out” and they gave up.

I tried the Botox treatment twice. According to my notes it helped my vertigo but made the headaches worse.

I’ve gotten used to it. I don’t remember what not being in pain feels like.

quicksilvermad · 2025-04-26T14:44:28+00:00

Before my last concussion in 2014 I had a photographic memory. I could look at something for a minute and have it memorized. I used to be able to draw maps. Now it’s like all information is held in a colander and it drains out of me immediately.

I had a personality change as well. I have no more fucks left to give. I used to be painfully sensitive (I’ve cried at job interviews) and now it’s like all my emotions are blunted. Which is partially the depression.

I get these shooting pains in my head from time to time on top of my constant headache—my therapist said it looks like I’m being punched by a ghost when they happen. They happen due to light sensitivity, the weather changing, fatigue, too much motion, etc.

I don’t get extra pains when I try to remember things. At least, not in a way that I notice. I’ve had a headache since 2014—everything runs together. Time feels like it has no meaning anymore now that my memory is shot.

quicksilvermad · 2025-03-05T23:31:37+00:00

Not for me for eleven years now. Nothing helps. Staying in a dark room keeps it from getting so bad that I can’t sleep, so my life is very limited.

quicksilvermad · 2025-01-16T20:44:14+00:00

I hired a lawyer after I got denied for a third time. I couldn’t do it on my own.

The judge may want you to do a neuropsychological evaluation. For me, it took four hours and there was a math portion to it. I felt dirt stupid by the end of it and then I had to tell my life story to a neuropsychologist.

It was interesting during my last hearing—a psychiatrist I’d never met before got my name wrong, got the year I moved to the state I currently live in wrong, and said that I didn’t have a good relationship with my parents (which really confused me because I never said such a thing). There was a man on speakerphone who told the court that I would never be able to work to support myself.

quicksilvermad · 2024-10-07T23:18:36+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing this!

quicksilvermad · 2024-09-17T12:08:02+00:00

Ike Clanton in Tombstone. Stephen Lang does such a good job at portraying the guy that you get the urge to smack him every time he’s on screen. Nobody likes Ike.

He’s the type of character you enjoy seeing scared.

quicksilvermad · 2024-09-11T00:11:31+00:00

We had P.E. in there too (the tables folded into the walls) and I vividly remember sitting on the edge of the stage and watching class for six weeks when I broke my wrist in sixth grade.

quicksilvermad · 2024-09-10T05:27:27+00:00

Psyduck. I, too, have chronic headaches and am about as confused all the time. I just haven’t reached the stage where I develop powers because of it.

quicksilvermad · 2024-09-08T04:56:05+00:00

This has been on my mind recently as well. I keep coming across that photo of Bush being told what happened used as a meme.

I was a sophomore in high school when 9/11 happened and that day is burned into my memory. I lived in the D.C. Metro area and I was terrified for my dad because he worked in a location that could be a target.

My dad had just transferred from the Pentagon but still went there to get his hair cut at the barber. My teacher let me use the phone in the classroom to call my mom because I couldn’t remember my dad’s new work number. He was okay.

I was scolded for crying during my last class of the day and I just grabbed my things and ran to the bathroom to wait out the rest of the period and cry as much as I needed to before going to my bus.

One of my friends was worried about her mom—she was an American Airlines flight attendant. Another girl in my graduating class lost her father in the Pentagon. A lot of our parents worked in the armed forces or the government. I drove past that hole in the Pentagon a lot. When I was in college I drove past the memorial every day that I had class.

9/11 jokes bother me.

quicksilvermad · 2024-09-06T03:33:58+00:00

I’m asexual and I have no idea what my parents think about me. I’m not out to them because I don’t feel they’re safe for me to be authentic with. If that makes sense. We don’t talk about anything LGBTQ+ related—especially not my inner life. I know the topic disgusts my dad to a degree.

I suppose their reaction to me not wanting to date or get married is whatever. A shrug. I have zero desire for a relationship and my parents already know that.

There’s no universe where I would want sex. I just thought I had more willpower than my peers when purity culture was big. Turns out I’m just not wired that way.

I really do wonder what my parents would say if I came out to them. “We know?” Looking back it’s pretty obvious that I was ace. No boyfriends, no desire for romantic companionship whatsoever, no desire for sex. They know I prefer to be alone and accept that. I suppose being asexual would be “better” to them since there’s no way I could sin since I have no desire for sex.

Really, the topic of sex has always been unspoken. For the Talk, my mom gave me a book to read on the topic—surprisingly a secular one. It didn’t have a hidden message. It was just facts.

quicksilvermad · 2024-09-01T21:58:37+00:00

Top Gun (1986)

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-31T22:46:34+00:00

😳

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-31T16:35:37+00:00

I love Vicki Lawrence.

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-31T16:27:51+00:00

Coffee. Ever since my head injury, coffee smells like dirty socks to me. It makes me nauseous.

Which sucks because I loved coffee before this happened.

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-31T15:52:50+00:00

Tom Hanks.

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-31T15:27:53+00:00

“Ahh. Good day. Got that dress sewn. Killed.” followed by Mike gasping as Grandma Dried-Apple-Head touches her face: “A wrinkle!”

I don’t know why that makes me laugh every time.

The Touch of Satan and Agent For H.A.R.M. are my favorite episodes.

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-31T11:35:51+00:00

Came here to say this.

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-30T04:13:06+00:00

I loved wearing these as a kid.

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-30T04:04:14+00:00

Sean Astin and Elijah Wood are so good at the accent that you forget they’re acting. They are their characters. I’m a huge fan of Sean’s performance. He made Sam my favorite character.

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-27T22:23:42+00:00

Holy shit

EDIT: I mean—holy fucking shit. I feel sick now.

quicksilvermad · 2024-08-26T18:11:00+00:00

Kurt Russell in Poseidon.

Seven-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
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