I really need to unload right now. Before I went into the hospital, for the first time when I was 24 I had an excellent memory.

In 9th grade every week we were given a list of 20 words that we had to look up in the dictionary and write down the definition in our own words. On Monday the teacher would tell us the words in random order and we had to spell them. I never did the homework in English or Social Studies. I couldn't be bothered. So just before class I'd memorize all 20 words, just the spellings. I rarely got below an 80 on the test.

These days my memory is fair at best. Unless something really sticks wth me, if I don't write it down and read it at least 3 times odds are when you tell me it again 2 weeks later it will be like you never told me it before.

That loss would be tough enough. Although my self-esteem is good these days there are still a few old messages that I'm having trouble replacing. My girlfriend has been helping me with them but sometimes it's still tough.

I was always an excellent student in school, when I wanted to be. I did so well in my College English class my senior year that the college I was accepted to (I never got to go) sent me a letter saying I could skip the regular freshman english class and take the next one in line instead. Heck, I understand how the 10 dimensional universe is thought to work. School told me that because I was very smart I had to hold myself to higher standards than most people. "Don't use slang. That's too common. You're much better than that." I'm sure everybody was told that but I was told to talk like I ate Stephen Hawking's work dictionary every day for breakfast.

I know this sounds incredibly... snobbish? Stuck up? OK, we all know the word I mean here. Essentially I was told i was too smart to have memory problems. Well I do. There's nothing wrong with it. It's common with people with mental illnesses. But according to what I was told I'm not supposed to have a mental illness either. But I got past that and I'm trying to get past this too.

Really quickly because it doesn't really belong here. You know what we nerds (me), geeks, and dweebs went through in school. But we don't talk about the fact that it wasn't our idea to excel in school. Our teachers forced us to live up to those expectations.