Month: January 2020

Although having Asperger’s is wonderful because it makes you special, for example people with Asperger’s (well in my experience anyway) are very honest and they will never deliberately deceive you or trick you or con you and what’s more, they can’t understand why in the world would anyone ever want to be so selfish to begin with.

However, being an aspie also comes with its disadvantages. And one of them is having no short-term memory to speak of at all. That means that when you meet new people, especially if you meet a lot at the same time, their names just breeze in through one ear and out the other.

So when you are talking to your new acquaintance again, you just have to pretend you can remember their name, until someone comes up and calls them by their name. And if after 2 days or so no one has come up and called them by their name, then you must just smile and admit that you can’t remember their name. Which looks a bit silly if you have been talking to them for 2 days.

Or you can resort to different strategies to remember their names. I recently met a woman named Barbara. The next day when I saw Barbara I told myself: Now remember that that is BARBARA, it is easy to remember because Barbara is all dressed in blue.

Now, in addition to Asperger’s I also have synesthesia (which I might write about in another post one day), that is, I see letters, numbers and names with colours. And for me the letter B is blue, and so is the name Barbara. And Barbara just happened to arrive that day dressed in blue.

So after a day of observing a blue-coloured Barbara whose outfit matched the colour of her name, I had no more difficulty remembering her name.

But that doesn’t always happen. Which means that every time you meet new people you must dream up ingenious designs to try and remember their names without tipping them off. Because when you don’t remember people’s names, they have a tendency to get offended and to think the reason you can’t remember their names is because they didn’t stand out enough in your mind, or you didn’t pay enough attention to them. They don’t think it’s because you have no short-term memory.

Another strategy is to ask them for their phone number and send them a cute cat photo, like this one.

After that you will have them in your whatsapp and hopefully they would have put their name in their profile hehe.

Of course the easiest thing would be to simply tell them that you can’t remember their name. But that is usually not a good idea because, as I mentioned before, people tend to get offended if you can’t remember their name.

So how about you? Does short-term memory deficiency cause you problems in your life? Do leave me a comment, I lurrrve to receive (positive, non-spammy) comments.

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