Hey all,

Just curious about something. I'm in my 30s and it took me until my early to mid 20s to realize that the cartoon thought bubbles or echoy voiceover thinking in shows and movies was kind of a real thing.

I almost never can visualize, and when I do it's not something I can control. I can't just summon the image of an apple in my head, but apparently everyone else around me can. Even when I can visualize, it's like a thin mist that's hard to pinpoint details and easily blown away.

Similarly, I almost never have an internal monologue. The times I do are short-lived and conversational, like "Wow, you should really wake up, it's past noon". or something.

However, I'm pretty good at playing songs in my head and quietly jamming out to sounds that don't exist.

When I have a puzzle or something I need to think about, my subconscious handles it and just tells me the answer most of the time, without me having to do anything but look at the problem and wait. That's super helpful for most day-to-day stuff, and people think I'm smart. But it means I'm terrible at doing math in my head, and can't think through any kind of complicated issue in my head.

It also doesn't help that my short term and long term memory are both terrible. Any memories older than a couple of weeks are just gone, or they are emotionless fuzzy snapshots with no before or after. If I know something, it comes to mind without effort. If I don't know something, it's probably just gone forever unless I have some kind of visual reminder and get lucky.

Basically, I can't do anything in my head. I have to write it down, or have some other way to externalize the information in order to go over it. This make people think I'm stupid.

Add in the classic "bad at social-anything" and every interaction feels like a disaster.

And don't get me started on how often I forget what I'm doing or how badly I fail to multitask. Makes finding a job I can live on very hard, and the one time I had a decent job, I felt like I constantly had to prove myself. I was always making seemingly basic mistakes and letting everyone down.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I wanted to give kind of an overview of how my head works. I was wondering what kinds of brains everyone else is dealing with.

Does anyone else deal with things like visualization, or poor memory, or anything like that? How do you cope with the day-to-day?

Hey all,

I wasn't quite sure what to title this, so I gave up and just asked the question. I'll be a bit vague, as the point is not the specific bit of code I'm stuck on, but moreso the general issue of an uncooperative brain.

How do you make any real progress learning if you deal with frequent brain fog and have terrible short term and long term memory?

For example, I finally learned how something works after months of trying to wrap my head around it. Didn't end up using it for a few months more, and now I forgot it again. I'm back to square one, trying to relearn things I already learned. And that's assuming I wake up and can actually focus on anything. Some days, brain fog rolls into the harbor and I just stare dumbly at the screen, barely able to concentrate on the task, much less think about the code or complexities. It's impossible to make progress on days where I forget what I was doing before I even start.

Other days, my brain seems to be running on all cylinders, and I can storm through my work almost effortlessly, learning as I go and making more progress in a day than I did the week or two prior.

It seems like the only things I truly retain are mechanical. The basic nuts and bolts, the simple concepts like how variables work. It took me longer than I'd like to admit understanding calling and writing functions. Things that are more abstract or high level are easily forgotten. It's a nightmare.

So, what do I do? How an I work around this problem-child brain of mine and actually LEARN?

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who dealt with something similar. I'm also eager to hear from any fellow neurodivergent folk, who might have a similar problem wrangling their grey and white matter into shape.

UPDATE: Thanks for the ideas and encouragement, everyone. I'm a bit busy, but I'll get around to some individual replies soon. As a general note, seeing a doctor would be a good idea, but without insurance and a well paying job, I couldn't afford to see any kind of specialist, or even make frequent appointments with a GP. I appreciate the well wishes though.