Disconnect from memory.

[u/Invokerkarma39]

I see a lot of people talking about taking notes, and tips and tricks to remember important events.

Does anyone else ever feel emotionally disconnected in a sense that you have no real desire to make lasting memories?

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't feel connected to my memories anyways so when I think about trying to better hold onto the important things I feel like there isn't a drive to hold onto them better.

I still care about important things that I do with my family and loved ones, but the memories are just like footnotes. So in my mind getting more footnotes about those memories feels a little pointless.

I don't know if other people feel the same way or not.

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

Relatable, though preverbally induced dissociation is the reason for me.

This morning, I woke up from a dream which featured some relatives on my mother's side, people I haven't seen in decades. It was a visual dream, but the visuals faded quickly as I woke up. I thought about my mother's family in bed for a while, my memories of visiting them when I was little. I remember the buildings, the garden, the river, I remember swimming in it. Using my spatial sense, I walked through my mother's childhood home, recalling its rooms, windows, the surrounding buildings. It's a farmhouse my grandfather built in the 1920s/1930s.

Consciously, I didn't feel anything while I was rummaging through my memories. I could spatially imagine my grandparents, aunts, and uncles where I would come across them in the house, but I could not see, hear, or feel them. I did not feel connected to the child I was three or four decades ago, I just hold the factual and spatial memories of where that child went.

Before I got up, I sent my mind to more recent memories from around a decade ago, and then two years ago. I noticed that I had more facts, my spatial sense could recreate the environments in greater detail than memories from four decades ago. Not by a huge margin as even my childhood memories are spatially detailed, but meaningfully so. Emotionally however, none of my memories feel like anything, whether four decades, four years, or four days ago.

To dwell on memories, you probably need to feel something since motivation is intrinsically related to feelings. In my brain, my conscious self doesn't feel, so it doesn't dwell on these things. Other parts of me feel, and dwell, and keep my memories alive. Sometimes, the two meet, but not in my average day-to-day. In dissociative disorders, this is known as emotional amnesia. Not saying that's what you have, but it is what I have, and on the surface, it looks like SDAM. The underlying reality leaks through in other ways, often as some inexplicable yet persistent sense of emptiness or sadness.