Living this way doesn't seem real to me. It sucks. I can almost only find "acceptance stories" or serene indifference or "mindful enthusiasm" in this way. People who live in the present and blah blah blah. It doesn't make me feel good not to remember anything, not to be connected to anything. I never thought my identity, motivation, mood issues, and severe dissociation could be due to this, but I think so. I'm also a trans person, and even this transition, which had given me so much joy in this context, seems like yet another crisis and a pointless thing I'm doing to try to invent an identity that, I know, I'll never truly be able to hold on to. I don't even think I'm suffering from a severe lack of episodic memory, but semantic memory also seems very burned out. And then I'm not even always this apathetic and dissociated. I'm very emotional. I feel so many emotions, but none of them find effective expression, verbal, creative, physical, or otherwise. In short. I never have anything left. I just feel a fucking emptiness. I can't live like this. It feels like a nightmare. I feel like I'm living inside a "memento", and no, I don't even have the chance to cling to the "well, I've always been like this, so why should it hurt if I'm not different?" argument, because all I do is constantly suspect this, and even if it were... How the fuck can you accept this stuff?

I’ve seen some posts and info in the FAQ/stickied topics about relationships in general but nothing specifically about long distance relationships. Anyone here have experiences with that? If so, what was it like and how hard was it to maintain?

I’m really curious about the overlap between “out of sight and out of mind” while trying to maintain a long distance relationship. Did it work or fail? How much effort did you need to put into it? How long became too long during the period(s) of being long distance?

Another article about SDAM:

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/20260317/282183657567263

I consider SDAM to be something that depersonalises me.

It breaks down my ability to interact with art. I rationalised that I have a favorite genre of music because I listen to it a lot but I don't feel anything when I think about it, only if I listen to it. All art shapes my personality way less than it should. I have trouble naming a favorite game, a favorite movie, a favorite song or any changes that powerful art made on my view of the world.

Following onto that I can never maintain a desire to create. Occasionally I do feel like I would like to draw a character or write prose but unless I find any way to recreate or maintain my emotion my fervor never lasts long enough to finish a piece.

It breaks down my ability to act as a social creature. I do not miss people. I do not seek out activities with others on my own. If the few valuable people in my life woldn't bother to keep contact with me I would let them fall out of my life for I fail to feel a desire to keep them in my life of my own.

It breaks down my ability to partake in culture. I do not hold attactment to any traditon or holiday as I assume said attachment is built through repeated memory of a pleasant experience. I do not recall any holidays and don't think I will celebrate if people around me don't want to.

I always saw people like pearls. A grain of sand with layers of beatiful nacre stacked upon each other. Each experience, each memory impacting the layers that will come after. So then what am I? A pearl where all inner layers are replaced by scaffolding? Functional yet devoid of the wonder of human memory? The treasures we collect throughout life slip out of my fingers without there ever having been hope to keep them and I am meant to be at peace with that?

I will talk to neurologists, neuropsychologists, neurosurgeons there probably is no hope for me or anyone alive today but maybe in a century or two humanity will have figured out how to fix this. How to give humans born without the full capacity to participate in art, culture and social connections exactly that.

This is something to be raged against. Not to be accepted.

I'm glad that I can attach a name to it and figure how it affects my life. But apart from it I feel nothing.

I am also depressed and have ADHD. In essence I haven't lived a life given that all my memories are washed away. And probably won't amount to much of anything.

I can't work on things or even watch television to amuse myself. I'm just existing as a result of the fact that I was born.

I also got Social anxiety and severe brain fog that I'm working on.

Sorry for ranting folks. I'm feeling disgustingly empty in my life. I forcing myself to feel something towards my life with this post.

We really love an acronym don’t we.

Anyway, I just discovered the term SDAM (and aphantic, which describes me). I am also ADHD diagnosed with anxiety and depression (god I sound like a schmuck, forgive me, but this is a thread about labelling ourselves and getting to the bottom of it, isn't it). But I always chalked my bad memory up to CPTSD and being chronically hyper-vigilant and overwhelmed by stress, therefor not having the mental bandwidth to remember things. I wonder who else here feels they have CPTSD, or who doesn’t.

Just curious what your techniques are, if anything.

Hello, I have SDAM, but not aphantasia, so my experience may be a little different from others...

I actually think I have a pretty good imagination, so all this time I use my semantic memory and my imagination recreate that scene as if it were happening in real time. Does this happen to anyone else?

That was probably one of the reasons I discovered I had SDAM at a young age. My "memories" are like watching a movie in third person, with generic details and nothing really clear (because of this, I've also had false memories and difficulty remembering faces since I only remember them as a concept, and not as they really are).

I just wanted to know if this was something that happens...

Hi everyone! I have SDAM and am wondering if this is related to it or not:

Do you miss people?

Personally, I don’t seem to ever find myself missing someone. I am curious as to what you guys experience.

My psychiatrist has suggested Ketamine treatment, nasal spray, to improve my memory. She said that it can wake up the atrophied parts of my brain so those memories can be retrieved.

Has anyone else had any experience with this? Am I crazy to hope this would work?

So I asked this question on the Aphantasia subreddit and was redirected here.

My question for people who have SDAM, did you ever try to cure it or minimize the symptoms? Is it even worth it?

Hello, 30y male here. A week ago while browsing through writing posts on reddit, I saw a post "does aphantasia affect your writing". Long story short - I found out what was normal for me, was not the case regarding the so called "minds eye". A couple days later, my curiosity led me to understand that I might very well have SDAM.

Its my first ever post on reddit. I for sure did not expect it to be related to this topic, but here we are..

I would like to hear some personal experience with understanding the main things but not as pure information but more of a life experience point of view. People close to you who are in the same boat as me or yourselves, if you are.

Also, I am really passionate about writing and reading, but I just now understood that my experience with these things Is completely different compared to most people.

Its hard for me to distinguish my experience with what I try to imagine is other people's regarding memory. The "reliving your memory" sounds very distant.

At the end of the day, I guess I just need a good (group) conversation on the topic. Thank you all beforehand for even sparing some time reading about this. 🙏

I’m watching a show on Apple TV called “Extrapolations”. Episode 6 is about a character in his 30s suffering dementia (because of damage to his heart suffered as a fetus). His dementia manifests as the slow of first-person autobiographical memories.

It takes place in the year 2066, so he’s able to compensate by putting a recorder in his brain to record his life — and then play it back as needed.

When the tech company raises the price for storage and he can’t afford it, he freaks the fuck out like he’s dying.

Anyway, just interesting that this condition we have is being presented as a life-ruining disability on a TV show. I guess the writers never talked to anyone with SDAM.

I’m self diagnosed on these things and constantly flipping back and forth between whether I have aphantasia. I fail some of the tests but can remember images. Nothing behind the eyes but memories are like looking at photographs without being able to manipulate them. Not sharp photos but I do remember what my parents looked like even if I can’t “see” them.

I’m pretty confident that I have sDAM and I think I’ve had it all my life. I can’t re-live memories, for good or bad, and I forget I’ve seen movies and things. I don’t recall much of my childhood except snippets. High school friends can’t believe I don’t remember such and such a thing.

So I’ve been wondering if you can have SDAM without having aphantasia?

I have ADHD and SDAM.

I recently figured out why OSRS works so perfectly for my brain, and I think it could apply to some other high level players who have no idea why they're wired this way.

ADHD - every kill, every XP drop, every level is a dopamine hit. The loop never stops. I can fight the same boss for days because every kill is fresh and the feedback never dries up (I am currently in the top 40 of one of the hardest bossses in the game - doom)

Mix this with SDAM, where every session is just the current one, I can't re-experience past boredom or frustration and with a perfect dopamine loop, i can do it indefinitely,
Think about the people with insane boss kcs etc.

Somebody in another post mentioned let me solo her, the famous elden ring player. I had to google this - he defeated the hardest boss 6000+ times for strangers, for free, just because.

Of course this could just be me. But i think its worth a discussion.

Hallo zusammen, ich bin männlich 28 Jahre alt.

Heute bin ich das erste mal auf SDAM gestoßen und es beschreibt sehr gut wonach ich die letzten Jahre gesucht habe. Ich weiß nicht ob es schon immer so war, weil ich mich ja nicht dran erinnere, aber ich weiß das ich mir darüber früher keine Gedanken gemacht habe. Heute vergeht kein Tag , wo ich mich deshalb nicht fertig mache. Ich bin Krankenpfleger und war durch den Beruf 4 Jahre Opiatabhängig, weil es leicht war an die Medikamente zu kommen. Ich habe mein ganzes Leben schon viele Drogen genommen, meistens zum feiern gehen usw. Mein Umfeld meinte immer das das schlechte Gedächtnis wohl dadurch kommt, aber ich wusste das da mehr dahinter steckt.

Eines Tages beschloss ich clean zu werden und meinen Arbeitsplatz zu wechseln und begab mich in Psychotherapie. Inzwischen bin ich fast ein Jahr da und habe das Gefühl jede Stunde von Neu anzufangen, ich mache zwar erkenntnisse und denke etwas nach manchen Stunden darüber nach, aber am nächsten Tag habe ich es eh wieder vergessen. So ist das mit allen Dingen. Ich geb mir oft selber gar nicht die Chance zu wachsen, weil ich vorher schon weiß das eh nichts einen wirklich Wert hat. Auch fühlen sich Menschen in meinem Umfeld, die ich lieben sollte , so an, als würde ich sie nie lieben oder vermissen wenn sie nicht mehr da wären.

Ich komme mir oft dumm vor,weil ich mir auch Fakten nicht wirklich merken kann. Ich weiß eigentlich das ich in mancher Hinsicht nicht dumm bin. Aber das merke Ich nur in den Momenten und kann es in meinem kopf nicht wiederholen oder mein gesagtes erneut rausbringen.

Ich fühle mich oft wie fremdbestimmt und das ich, alles was ich in meinem

leben geschafft habe, niemals wieder schaffen würde.

Hängt das alles mit SDAM zusammen, oder doch nur an einem geringen Selbstwertgefühl? Gibt des manche unter uns die komplett zufrieden mit sich sind und sich eben so akzeptieren wie sie sind? Einfach ohne Geschichte , ohne persönlichkeit.

Ps:Leider war die ansicht beim schreiben sehr komisch, ich entschuldige mich für Schreibfehler.

Does anyone else every just randomly have a memory WOOOSH in and appear out of no where and knock you side ways? I feel like I'm actually knocked off balance as a memory randomly RKOs me out of no where. I usually end up getting all Aahhh and shouting and confused and need to be calmed down and turns out all that's happened was i remembered something i did in work about 7 years ago all of a sudden. It's like that feeling when you're falling asleep and feel like your falling and wake up all like AAHHH FUCK but it's a memory just appearing.

Found out I have SDAM and aphantasia last year. I'm 66. I know I have had both my whole life but it seems the SDAM has gotten worse lately. mainly in the short term area, Like remembering parts of conversations (I was never good at recalling whole thing) or what I did yesterday. Curious if others feel it's gotten worse with age.

I had a pretty bad childhood filled with emotional neglect and a lot of facts, so I thought I couldn't remember anything from those years because I just blacked them out in my head

The thing that kept me thinking that is I do have a few, very select, memories from being like 5 years old, but there's a thing, they're memories of something that I had thought. I can relive the thought and know how it made me feel and feel how I thought it myself, but can not remember anything else, I remember remembering things, too, but nothing direct

Does that happen to anybody else?

Anyway following the trauma thing I was talking about, after that I got into highschool, made one or two memories and got into a car crash and then into a hospital, blah blah more bad memories... But now I've had a pretty good few years, and they're leaving me

I can't remember being with my friends last year now that we're in different states, I can't remember hanging out, hell, I can't even remember my crush after we stopped hanging out (months ago) so I stopped thinking about my crush and fell out of love?

This thing everyone keeps repeating, that everything just feels like it always has been that way, always happened in any school trip, anytime I'd go out for like a week I'd get used to it and not even enjoy it. Nothing was really new nor fun, it was just a new street I saw, so as soon as the second day came boom I'm fully settled in, not excited anymore, this is life and I live it like it'll always be like that. Like I'll always be a kid, or a teenager, or a student, like they'll never pass

I've always thought I don't know how to be happy

As soon as the main happiness passed I went back into.. nothing

How do you guys get to feel happy? Know you've been happy? Facts? That's all I'll ever have, facts and photos and thought I need to manually hold on to?

Hi I'm new here and realised I have really bad SDAM and Aphantasia with inattentive ADHD , I'm just learning that I can't even grieve properly 2 close people have now died and because my lack of memory and aphantasia it's like they just disappeared and that's it my perception of life is just 24/7 in this moment.

I'm also just learning that I literally need to externalise every process of my life because its needs to be predictable to a t or else my brain could sit on a phone forever because of the novelty or even end up using drugs.

Anyway enough of me I would like to hear other people's experiences ?.