I do not remember my life and it's fine

I have a very very strong episodic memory.

I have a very hard time "selling myself". I've added solid stuff to my resume in the last year simply recalling what I've done from an outsider's view. From my perspective, I was just messing around. From another perspective, I was building "impressive" "successful" things.

Learning to give myself credit for my accomplishments is what I think made me the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer, as silly as that sounds.

You were LABELED with ADHD by people without our condition. "Having" it is accepting the label and it's definitions. The school system (counselors) tried to label both my kids as having ADHD and suggested medication. Instead of giving my kids amphetamines, I told them to stop trying to force everyone at the school to learn using methods that require memorizing images, which neither one of them do.

Our brains are workhorses of indexing things. Of course we have varying attention, especially when we already "get" what was shown to us. When others have to practice it over and over, we just "get it" and move on to something more interesting (and worthy of indexing). Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism is going to affect our ability to form good indexing habits.

As I read this I thought “this sounds a lot like having ADHD”. Sure enough…

Feeling like a spectator in your own mind is a very difficult phenomenon to deal with and to explain to people who don’t experience it. In a sense, sometimes it almost seems like other peoples lives are more real than mine, because I experience my own from such a peculiar lens. The experience of others seems much less adulterated by that interference. Of course, this is far from true, and only another illusion produced by my weird brain.

Like you I can’t sell myself at all. Not only is the recollection poor, but I give equal weight to my success and failures. I’m far too objective about myself in settings where I’m not supposed to be.

I think it is about adopting the right framework. A mix of Clayton Christiansen and 5 whys works for me (similar issues).

I start by writing down the big things: In this year I worked at/for/with ....

WHY was I there: I think about the major projects I did.

WHY was I there: I think (and try to verify) the impact #s/%s those projects had.

WHY was I there: I think about the technical and soft skills needed to make that happen.

WHY do I care: I consider if there is any configuration of things that would make me consider doing the project again.

Having to track past performance as a business made this much clearer -- I adopted the above approach to expand out CV, then developed a similar approach for business development templates to explain recent past work.

I sometimes will drop these templates into an LLM and have it work with me to define or identify ways to better communicate.

I do not have ADHD but also struggle to "sell myself". It's something I had to work on. My view is that the industry can be kind of obsessed with these kind of stories. It's kind of like the "great man of history" world view, but in the small. A common challenge for me is in companies that have a "cultural" interview where they want you to talk about some conflict that happened and how you resolved this, either I'm incredibly naive or I just don't see conflict in this way that makes it a story. I just try to treat people with respect, I try to talk to them in a way that makes them feel open to talk to me. If I have hit conflict it didn't strike me as a moment where I had to think about it in that or it never escalated to being a problem. And it can be the same for programming. I don't have a cool story about the "hardest bug I ever solved" because it's just the same iterative process as any other challenge I have and it feels the same to me in the moment and after, just sometimes it takes longer. And I am no way trying to imply this represents some exceptional behaviour on my part, it's just by nature or nurture how things work, I didn't choose it.

I can relate to this very strongly. The difficulty in 'selling yourself' by recalling specific achievements for interviews or performance reviews is a challenge I know all too well.

Like you and the author, I have aphantasia (and possibly SDAM), but through self-reflection and quite a bit of therapy, I've come to believe this specific issue lies more firmly in the domain of ADHD. For me, the problem isn't just an inability to recall achievements, but a failure to feel a sense of achievement for almost anything in the first place.

A very recent example from my own life illustrates this perfectly: For context, I struggled through university for about 12 years without a degree before receiving my ADHD diagnosis. Afterwards, I decided to switch careers and applied for an apprenticeship as an IT specialist for system integration, essentially a helpdesk/support role. Because of my self-taught skills, I was hired directly, skipping the apprenticeship. Intellectually, I know this was a very good outcome. In the 8 months since, I've taken on tasks far beyond my initial role - automating reports, working on internal tooling and a local AI solution, and developing customer-facing tools. Just yesterday, I was officially promoted to Test Automation Engineer with a 50% salary increase.

And I know intellectually that going from applying for an apprenticeship to an engineering role in 8 months is a significant achievement. But I don't feel it as such. My dominant feeling is that, at 35, I'm finally just starting to catch up to my peers. To an outside observer, that probably sounds absurd.

My working theory for this is that it's a mechanism very similar to the common ADHD experience of misplacing keys. The issue isn't a failure to recall the memory of where you put them. The problem is that the memory was never properly encoded in the first place, because your attention was already split between several other thoughts at that moment. You can't retrieve a memory that was never saved.

I suspect something similar happens with achievements. If an event doesn't register emotionally as an "achievement" at the moment it happens, the brain doesn't file it under that tag. It just gets stored as another factual event - 'a thing that happened' - which makes it incredibly difficult to retrieve when a prompt like "tell me about a time you solved a hard problem" specifically asks for something from the 'achievements' file.

I've only just clued on to how my ADHD-PI has actually affected me. It was hard to tell because I'm evidently "smart enough" to work around the issues. Put simply, my "executive function" sends me a ton of inputs that I manage to juggle, but it takes effort, and so I look for ways to reduce my effort. So I'm not too good at recalling things like jokes, because I've put 0 effort in to remembering them. Part of the reason why is because I've been "shy" since childhood (because if you dont talk then you cant say something dumb or be rude - so problems solved), and so if I'm not talking, then there's no point in knowing jokes (and thus, potential effort is avoided). Just this afternoon I had a worked out that the reason why I don't "listen" to lyrics is likely because it requires "focusing" through the music, but I like the music, so I just listen to the vocals as if they were an instrument (and every now and then I'll just randomly hear some words, which gives the jist). I actually embody most of this meme: https://ifunny.co/meme/the-nooticer-the-37-year-old-nooticer...

Anyway, no more about that. Below is a very fresh "nooticing" — straight from my brain to ChatGPT to you;

Child 1) Me, male, left handed, ADHD-PI, aphantasia, strong spacial ability. Child 2) Female, right handed, ADHD-PI, good mental imagery, dyslexia, long time smoker. Child 3) Female, right handed, ADHD-PI, good mental imagery.

That's all of us, born around late-80's. I didn't dump that all that in to chatGPT (more of a drip-feed), but a pattern emerged quickly regardless; FYI: ADHD is in the Prefrontal Cortex (front of brain), whilst Dyslexia is in the Left Temporal Lobe (~mid left).

> Some studies suggest that fetal development could influence handedness. The position of the baby in the womb and the amount of hormonal exposure (such as testosterone levels) may have an impact on whether a person becomes left-handed or right-handed. Some theories propose that exposure to higher levels of testosterone during pregnancy may increase the likelihood of a person being left-handed.

> Spatial abilities are often tied to the right hemisphere of the brain, which might explain why some people with ADHD-PI (especially left-handed individuals) can develop enhanced spatial reasoning skills, even though their challenges with focus and attention are more prominent.

> Aphantasia, the inability to create mental images, has been linked to differences in how the brain processes and integrates visual information, particularly in the right hemisphere, which is responsible for spatial and visual processing.

> ADHD-PI and Dyslexia often co-occur, and research has shown that people with ADHD are at a higher risk of developing dyslexia or other learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia.

> Testosterone plays a critical role in fetal development, particularly in sexual differentiation (deciding whether a fetus develops as male or female). However, higher-than-normal levels of testosterone exposure during pregnancy can influence brain development, potentially affecting handedness, as well as behavioral tendencies (like aggression, risk-taking, and cognitive development).

> Elevated testosterone levels in utero have been linked to prenatal androgen exposure (often associated with more male-like traits), which may influence cognitive abilities and behavior: - Some studies suggest it could lead to enhanced spatial abilities and higher aggression. - On the flip side, it may increase the risk for neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD or dyslexia, depending on how it affects brain regions involved in attention, language, and executive function.

> There are a few reasons why a mother might have elevated levels of testosterone during pregnancy: - 1. Maternal Health Conditions (e.g., Polycystic Ovary Syndrome - PCOS) - 2. Stress During Pregnancy: Stress—especially chronic stress—can increase the levels of certain hormones, like cortisol. However, there is also some evidence suggesting that stress can lead to altered hormone balance, which might include an increase in testosterone levels. - 3. Maternal Obesity - 4. External or Environmental Hormone Exposure: Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are substances that can interfere with the body's hormonal systems. Some EDCs mimic or disrupt normal hormone functions, potentially leading to higher levels of testosterone in the body. These chemicals can be found in a variety of products, from plastics to pesticides.

Testosterone is the common thread there, and so the question is: why did mum have so much? She was both a stress-head and smoker, but I can't ask her any specifics, because she's dead. So in hind-sight I would say that she had ADHD as well, and so she must have been internalising many things that would then lead to overthinking, which would cause stress and anxiety ("over-worry" sort of thing).

Her and dad also smoked cigarettes forever since I can remember, but they would always go outside. I'm not sure if she smoked whilst pregnant, but I would have thought so, because the advice to quit may not have been common? My sister reckons she didn't though - so I don't know. Regardless, dad would have been smoking, but even when smoking outside, it's well known that 2nd and 3rd hand smoke can affect kids.

So I already suspected the smoking link (the nicotine to dopamine connection), but I didn't realise my left-handedness, spacial reasoning and aphantasia would all be implicated.

>This is exactly what I experience, and for me, this is a huge issue when it comes to 'selling myself', whether it is in an interview, or writing a self-assessment for a review.

I wonder if this is genetic. I have had a significant number of interviews with people from a couple specific geographic regions that cant relay to me details of a situation where they did XYZ. But given the question simply tell me how they would deal with it.

It made me super curious, because you could see in their job history that they definitely had those experiences but could not recall them.

My partner has this pretty significantly. One interesting byproduct is that for most of her life, she didn’t really understand that other people could just recognize and recall faces. So when a bartender would recall her by name when she had been to a place 3 or 4 times in the last month, she thought they were a creepy stalker and not just someone that automatically recalled her. Because for her it is a deliberate and active process of picking out distinctive traits (glasses, beard, bald, gaunt face, small nose, haircut) to “learn” someone’s face. Or thinking she was just completely anonymous if she went to the same club, on the same nights each week, stood in the same place, and people watched. She was horrified when I told her that everyone that worked there definitely remembered her and probably a bunch of the other regulars too.

I also have problems with faces, if they've changed slightly or I see them in unfamiliar places. I don't have aphantasia, or problems recalling my past - quite the opposite, I have strong visual memories from before I was three.

On the other hand I'm extremely good at recognizing people from their gait. I can see someone in the far distance and know who they are, even if we haven't met in years. For some reason I also recognize people from how they place their shoes.. as when I walked in somewhere and saw a pair of shoes and immediately knew that it was one of my cousins I hadn't seen in ten years.

This happened to me yesterday. Sorry Wolfgang.

I have a strong memory. I can cluster memories of a particular vibe (e.g. rainy atmosphere) on demand. But it hurts my brain if I do it too much.

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Yeah, this is mostly an interview prep thing. It's not nearly as bad and soul-sucking as Leetcode, but they both mostly answer the question of, "How much time did you spend preparing for interviews?"

For those of us who sometimes have trouble with "tell me about a time..." interview questions, but have no trouble recalling relevant examples when discussing an actual real-world question... I wonder whether part of the problem is the interview context is activating different thinking, and maybe you just need to trick yourself with a mental prompt, like:

"The interview is a colleague who is having trouble with a situation like this, and what advice would you give them, and what relevant supporting examples pop into mind? Great, now change gears, remember you're in a bad interview for some company that apparently does bad interviews, but don't tell the interviewer that, and instead carefully speak the most straightforward and uncontroversial example you thought of, in unhelpful STAR format. So that the interviewer can checkbox that you used STAR format. Bonus points if you can twist it to hit a Leadership Principle, and you should mention the Leadership Principle by name, so the interviewer doesn't miss it."

Yes, I think this is more of a retrieval issue than a memory issue. I have memories of most of the things I did in my work and studies, but I can't retrieve them based on an abstract query like "a difficult problem."

When I get a question like this, I have to find a more concrete approach to retrieve things I did (e.g. "what kinds of problems did I work on together with Sarah in the Compiler Design class"), and then filter them for difficult things that had interesting solutions.

I think what I find hardest about that kind of question in particular is that the first clause prompts me to think of problems that I didn't handle very well, but obviously I want to tell a story that makes me look good. Eventually I will probably think of the right story, after I throw out five or six of the wrong stories.

At some point I'd expect these questions to have come up enough for you to have some basis on which to speak. By the tenth interview asking a similar question, are you still trying to come up with something brand new on the spot? I have a lot of the issues mentioned in the article from face blindness to a general lack of memory around events. But I've talked about the time I accidentally ran "rm -Rf /." instead of "rm -Rf ./" on a production system on one of my first jobs and the lessons I'd taken away in probably over a dozen interviews during my life. I don't have to try to remember it.

One of my favorite managers comes across as a very charismatic person who always had great stories to tell about his life and work. After working with him for years, it became clear he had half a dozen decent stories he could tell well and rotated through them. Enough new people were introduced and others enjoyed his stories so would encourage it "Tell them about the time you worked for the Canadian Mafia!" They were crafted by that point. He didn't have to "remember" them so much as they were tools in his belt that he could pull out on demand. I'd guarantee some of those stories come out when he interviews somewhere.

What do you mean “hasn’t prepared for them”?

Isn’t just living and thinking preparing for questions like this? They’re not that hard.

I must respectfully challenge this interpretation on phenomenological grounds.

To presume knowledge of another's mind's eye is to commit a fundamental epistemic error. Having conducted extensive interviews with hundreds of subjects, I've discovered that visualization manifests along a vast spectrum of human experience, each with its own unique phenomenology and nomenclature. For some, the mind's eye is void; for others, it blazes with such intensity that it eclipses physical sight itself.

The bicycle-drawing analogy fundamentally misconstrues the relationship between mental representation and motor expression. These are orthogonal cognitive faculties—one need not be a sculptor to possess perfect proprioceptive knowledge of one's own face.

The eyewitness testimony example actually undermines the original argument. The critical factor isn't visual recall but temporal-causal sequencing—the who, what, and when of events. My research suggests that aphantasics demonstrate superior accuracy in reconstructing factual sequences, unencumbered by the distortions of visual reconstruction. Indeed, one might argue that the ideal witness would be someone who processes experience without the intermediary of visualization.

This points to a deeper truth about cognitive diversity: what some dismiss as deficit may in fact represent an alternative—and in certain contexts, superior—mode of engaging with reality. The visualizer's mind performs an act of creation with each recall, reconstructing and thereby potentially corrupting the original experience. The aphantasic mind, conversely, may preserve information in a more pristine, unrendered state—accessing facts without the degradation inherent in repeated mental imaging.

This is not merely a neurological curiosity but a profound philosophical distinction: between those who remember through representation and those who remember through direct apprehension. Each mode carries its own epistemic advantages, and our insistence on privileging the visual may blind us to entirely different ways of knowing.

I don’t think this really has much to do with fidelity/clarity, so much as accuracy. One could have an extremely high fidelity visual of a bike that is incorrect and you wouldn’t say they had aphantasia as a result.

I have aphantasia, I have no voluntary visual component to my mind as far as I can tell. I also have quite a good memory. If I were to draw a bike from memory I suspect I would make similar mistakes as those.

One thing I have noticed in the threads that come up about aphantasia is comments either directly or indirectly calling into question its validity. I want to share a test I got from another HN comment, so I won’t take credit, that I have found to be the easiest way to explain to people how completely absent the visual component is for me.

Close your eyes and imagine a ball bouncing across a table. Imagine the sound it makes as it goes. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. What colour is it?

Most people I ask answer this question without hesitation. It’s easy, because they were just looking at it, maybe still are. I have asked this question of various friends tens of times, and I still don’t know what colour the ball is for me because it doesn’t exist. I know what a bouncing ball looks like, I know the sound it makes. I know what colour it could be. But I’ve never seen it.

That is aphantasia. It’s not foggy, or blurry, or “low fidelity”, it’s just nothingness.

I have hyperphantasia, and only realized within the last decade or so that most people are not walking around with a detailed virtual overlay on the whole world.

This bicycle example really helps me appreciate the difference between how things are in my mind compared to most people's, and I appreciate your sharing it!

Memory uses lossy compression where sometimes the compression is terribly inaccurate or leaves nothing at all. C'est la vie.

Those seem like totally different things. If someone can visualize things in perfect detail, why would that necessarily mean they can remember the configuration of a bicycle?

So I read your comment before following the link and drew a bicycle perfectly.

I find it absolutely inconceivable that someone could be unable to draw a bicycle in Liverpool or a similar city.

I am not sure this is related to what OP is talking about.

You'd be surprised how developed these skills are in people that are in visual arts.

How could people possibly be this bad at drawing a bicycle!?

Was this study done on aboriginals living in a rainforest that have never gone to a paved part of the world where people use bicycles?

Sure, I'd get a bit flustered if asked to draw a modern mountain bike with rear suspension. Err... there's a spring back there... somewhere?

But an ordinary road bike? How could you get that wrong?

What helped me when I was grieving is to remember the feeling of the loved one's presence. At first it's subtle, then as you start enjoying the visualization it becomes more pronounced. Like imagine you're sitting alone and then that person walks in, and that "changes the room", probably in a different way than if any other person walked in. That wonderful feeling that comes over you when you remember the person's presence allows you to maintain a connection even when the person is not there physically. Or, at least, it did for me. This developed in me the sense that the person is still with me and always will be.

I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread has multiple threads about loved ones and grieving.

I have this anxiety for sure. I cant even picture her face.

Touching objects for me doesnt help, though looking at pictures does. Ive tried to get her to make scrapbooks for every year we have been together with explanations and stories, but no luck so far.

She remembers what we both were wearing the day we met.

I have aphantasia now and I miss being able to visualize anything at all.

I have the opposite of face blindness and subconsciously process every face but I have lethonomia (cannot remember people's names). Years ago, I was once riding my bicycle from campus at probably 21 mph / 30 kph and recognized the brother of a lab partner when they were completely to the side of me and 75' / 22 m away in profile after seeing a photo of them once. I'm probably not as good as I once was due to a TBI.

> I do get anxiety about not remembering people once they pass away.

Have you tried remembering how their presence felt/feels? Consciously identifying the feeling that a loved one "carried" was an important part of a recent grieving I went through.

This is uncanny, I was going to write almost this exact comment. I've been told mine is due to a deficiency in working memory, which can then lead to the brain not converting to long term memory. something that ADHDers present commonly with.

> and I told them that I did just had a quiet one at home, then later I'm reminded I actually went skiing or something

This is wild!

How about the pain of reliving old memories? I could do with a little less of that right now.

How do you know you have emotionally forgiven (as in let go) even if you have forgotten?

This is a rhetorical question... No need to answer for you situation but I wonder.

Same for me. I can visualize fine, but the author’s description of their memory, or lack thereof, is exactly what I experience. The thing about spatial memory especially. I could draw a decent floor plan of every place I’ve lived since the age of about 4. Some of those places I’d struggle to tell you about any concrete events I experienced there.

It isn’t something I’ve thought about too much. I’ve noticed that other people seem to remember events better, but it didn’t seem too remarkable. But the author’s presentation of this as anomalous really reframes it.

They do say that only half of people who have this also have aphantasia, so we’d expect plenty of people without aphantasia too.

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Our 23-year old son died two and a half years ago and while I'm sure SDAM helped me to get through the horrible immediate times, it's quite sad to be without a lot of detailed memories and events that I can look back on to relive the good times. On the whole, I'd rather have had a functioning episodic memory. (and my son)