As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been trying to take a hard look at myself of late. And though that’s mostly been diving into some of the bigger issues that I’ve identified in myself, I also keep stumbling across small, strange weaknesses that I’ve never really considered before. For example, it turns out I’m absolutely crap at remembering exactly when in the past things happened in my life.

Here’s a good, recent illustration: when designing workouts, it’s usually wise to do a ‘deload’ every four to six weeks – essentially, after beating yourself down with increasingly heavy weights and increasing intensity, week after week, for a subsequent week you step the intensity way back, often literally halving the weights used, to give your body a chance to recover. Recently, I’ve been playing around with daily and weekly workout structures in my own workouts, but I haven’t been paying close attention to the multi-week cycles that would include a deload. But, this week, feeling pretty run down, I commented to a friend at the gym that I thought I could probably use one. I just felt like I needed a break. Which was weird, I told him, as I’d just taken time off, during a week when the gym happened to be closed. My friend looked at me funny, and then reminded me that the gym was actually closed at the end of August, almost three months back.

Similarly, if you asked me in what year I did certain things – when I moved to a given apartment, started a company, worked on some project, headed off on a big trip—I’d have pretty much zero idea. Which is weird, because I actually tend to have very vivid and detailed memories of all of the individual episodes; I just can’t really order them, or place them specifically in time.

Fortunately, unlike any number of other things I’m working through, this one doesn’t seem to cause problems in my life, at least so far as I can tell. But, it’s an interesting quirk of my brain to consider going forward. And I suspect ‘consider’ is about the best I can do. Because, though I’m finding ways to work through and resolve a bunch of my other stuff, this is one I’m not even vaguely sure how to debug.