Lost my mind, again - day 38

How is it that some people can remember everything they have ever read in their lives and others can't remember the time they just read on their phone when they just looked at it?  How are  minds and memories so different? Is this something that a person can be trained to do or is it a super power that some have and others just don't?  Is forgetting why I walked into a room a sign of things to come?

I had similar conversations just yesterday with a couple people.  One was just comical, joking that I couldn't make up my mind about something if I had already lost it.  But the other was quite serious.  Sometimes I do feel I am losing my mind.  Struggling to remember the simple things like what I had for dinner yesterday or what was said in a conversation I had last week, or even what the subject was of something I wrote a month ago. How can I be so absent minded?  It's like my memories are backed up on a server and when I go to get them, the network is temporarily down.

Since I was a teenager in school, I have always taken notes, written things down, telling myself if I wrote it down, I didn't have to remember it.  I'm sure I heard that somewhere as a tip for taking notes, probably from some teacher but maybe my mind changed it up a bit. Maybe it was really that if I take good notes, it will help me to remember. Is that how this started?  Did I start my mind down this path of forgetting things once they were committed to paper?  Or am I literally losing my mind?  It's not like I did drugs as a kid and did permanent damage.  Yes, I remember those silly commercials...This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs.  Those, while not meant to be funny, kind of were, but maybe that is why they were memorable. 

However, I did get hit a lot in my earlier years (another rant I hope not to tap into again).  Was that what caused it? Did the memory part take one too many blows when I was young?  I know my mind has blocked out small chunks of things that happened to me as a child, things that were just too horrible to hold on to, for which I am truly grateful.  How I know this is because a few have slipped through the block and come back over the years. 

I know that the mind, as another organ of the human body, does what it can to heal itself.  Maybe not only from physical trauma, but mental trauma as well, which can be just as damaging.  Maybe my mind spent so many years saving me from those mental and emotional traumas of my younger years, hiding them in the vast library of my mind to stop them from hurting me over and over again, that it didn't realize it was filing away other things too, things I wanted and needed to recall.  Maybe I need to figure out how to rewire my brain so I can remember the important things and even unimportant things that happen now, going forward.  In thinking about it, I don't think that it is my mind not remembering so much as it is my mind determining what is worth recalling and what needs to be stuck in a file and not accessed as easily.  That's the part I need to fix.

So the question, how to do I retrain my mind to reach into those files and recall more things?  Is there some exercises I can do?  I know I have seen and heard commercials about brain games, do they work?  I have tried a few and I didn't seem to have problems recalling lists of things I memorized or have seen recently like shapes and lines and such.  Maybe I just need to continue to acknowledge the issue and keep looking for ways to improve my recollection, close the gaps in what feels like my swiss-cheese mind so not as many things fall into the holes and get lost.

Goal:  Do daily exercises with my brain to retrain it to recall things better and not file important thoughts and lessons away into the hidden files quite so quickly.