I am struggling with some serious memory issues and I'm trying to figure out an explanation. Here are my theories:

1. Is due to being Bipolar
2. Due to medication
3. Anterograde Amnesia

I have mild cognitive impairments. Probably accounted by my mental illnesses and medication. But I don't think it covers as a full explanation for my memory issues.

I can't remember faces. As a sales associate, this happens all the time at work. I'll get to fetch a box of shoes, come out, and can't recognize the customer I spoke to a moment ago. Or repeat customers return and talk to me like they know me and I have no idea who they are. Or strangers coming up and talking like they know me. Or me going up to strangers thinking I know them when I don't. They just look like someone I use to know. When I first started I couldn't recognize coworkers and spoke to a few of them as if I never met them before...despite talking to them the previous day.

I struggle with remembering names. Learning new information. Recalling information I learned in college. I have this degree and I know next to nothing about it. I have no idea how to use it or what kind of job its good for. Considering I got mostly 4.0s in my studies, this is a little...disconcerting. I can't remember the theories my professor so pointedly said I was a master of. Remembering appointments, when I work, is a challenge. I can barely keep track of what day or month it is, despite having a calendar and using it. The last 6 years is mostly a blank. I'm missing memories from chunks of my life, but can recall pretty well 2010 and my life prior to that year. The end of 2010 was when I went on psychiatric drugs.

So are all those memory problems common with people who are bipolar? Can they be accounted for by mild cognitive impairments? Or medication? Both?

I'm pretty much very, very frustrated because not remembering things makes it difficult to know who I am and think of the future. I can't see a future because I have trouble seeing the past. Its like I don't have an identity, and I'm just really lost in this fast moving world that I can't keep up with. I struggle getting through a single day.