My Memory Lies to Me

Back Then

I spent some time working at a big tech company.

The rest of the team was in another city. I was the only one based in my city, so every meeting was a video call. Apart from the few teammates I worked with remotely, people probably saw me as a quiet person.

It wasn't that I didn't want to socialize. I had no energy left for it.

My calendar wasn't full. Two or three meetings a day, with big blank stretches in between. But those blanks were never really mine. I never knew when the next message would come, or when a "got a sec to sync?" would pop up and break whatever flow I had. Without noticing, I picked up the habit of watching the work chat at all times. At weekend dinners, my friends sometimes teased me for opening the work app in the middle of a conversation.

What I do remember is that my memory got bad around then. I kept forgetting things. Even meals. Even my medication.

Back then I got home long after dark. I would leave the lights off on purpose and lie on the couch for half an hour. My head was too loud and I wanted it to quiet down. While I was at it, I would mentally pull up something like an end-of-level results screen and ask what I had actually achieved that day. Except for the few days when something actually shipped, the score rarely looked good.

What Was Wrong

I couldn't say what was wrong. Was I inefficient? Was I just weak? And what did "efficient enough" even look like? What counted as not weak? I had no idea.

With no answer, I tried to measure myself instead. I broke every day's to-dos into tiny pieces. Nothing changed. The tasks were so small that checking them off did nothing for me.

I also spent a lot of evenings talking things through with AI assistants. They could help me break down whatever I put in front of them. But they could only work with what I remembered to tell them. And what I remembered to tell them, I had usually already thought through. Those conversations could calm me down. They couldn't solve anything. Sooner or later I went quiet again. One open-ended conversation blurred into the next, with no end in sight.

Later I went back to my therapist. She asked: "You keep telling me how you feel. Have you ever looked for where the tiredness comes from? Do you actually know what's wearing you out?"

I sat there for a long time and couldn't get a word out. I realized I couldn't describe a single concrete thing that made me tired.

Before I left, she gave me a suggestion: write down what happened and how it felt at the time. Then put it away. No need to explain it, no need to find the answer right away.

Leaving a Record

Fair enough. If you want to see a pattern, you first need something to look at. I took the advice.

From then on, during the day, I messaged myself. Whatever came to mind. What happened, who had messaged me, how I felt at that moment. Then I locked the phone.

Messaging apps timestamp everything, which would make it easy to sort through later, if I ever did.

My evenings didn't change. After lying there for a while, I would still open an AI assistant and go through the whole day again. The messages I'd sent myself during the day, I never looked at again. The two things ran side by side, and I never thought they had anything to do with each other.

The Turning Point

I kept this up for about a month. Without meaning to, I had over a hundred messages.

Then came a bad day. Bad enough that I had no energy left to go through the whole day again. So I pulled together the month of messages to myself and dropped them all into the conversation where I usually did my debrief.

After a while, long paragraphs started appearing on the screen.

I don't remember exactly what it said. What stayed with me was this: the story I'd been telling it often didn't match what I'd written down in the moment.

Patterns

Following its lead, I went back through the records.

"10am meeting. Next week's schedule is set."

"Finished both pages this afternoon. Sent."

"Got pulled into an unplanned call at four."

But that night, what I'd told the model was: "Meetings all day. Nothing moved."

I hadn't forgotten the ten o'clock meeting, or the pages I sent out that afternoon. Each of them was still there on its own. But by evening, memory had filed "a day where a few things moved" as "a day where nothing moved." It hadn't made anything up. It had just led me to the opposite conclusion.

I went back a few more days. The records were full of lines like these:

"A few questions I have to remember to ask. Last time it wasn't clear."

"Pulled into a meeting."

"The brief changed again. No one explained what I was supposed to change. Fine, I'll go with my own read."

"Asked once. The answer was 'take another look.' Okay."

"Ugh, forgot my meds again. At least it's not four yet."

These lines repeated, scattered across different times and different days. On their own, each was too small to mention when I talked through my day at night.

Only when they were side by side did I see it. What repeated wasn't just a few tasks. It was the way I handled them. The things that wore me down kept changing their setting, their timing, their source, and kept testing me the same way.

From then on, one thing changed: I could finally step out of those scenes and see them from the outside.

What Came Next

Later, when I had time, I turned this way of recording into a small tool.

The idea was simple. I would say something, and it would keep it. Whether it was work, life, or part of a particular project, it would sort that out itself. I set up a lot of very specific folders back then: a project I was working on, a question I wanted to think through slowly. Whatever came up went in.

Before long, I turned off the replies. Most of the time I wasn't there to chat. I just didn't want to lose the thought. Just keep it. Unless I actually ask a question, there's no need to answer.

As the records piled up, a new problem appeared. Everything was there, but I wasn't going to read through it every day. What I really wanted it to do was what the model had done for me that night: notice what tends to show up together, what I've said many times already, and put it back in front of me.

The records also contained another kind of thought: something due tomorrow, or something I'd promised someone and still hadn't done. The information was already there. Could it find me when the time came? That was how reminders were added, bit by bit.

Looking back, I never wrote a proper feature list. I just kept using it, and wherever it fell short, I changed it a little.

Through a long stretch of days without any positive feedback, this little tool kept me going. So much is too small to notice. But once I actually wrote it down, I could see that on the days I'd overlooked, every step I took still counted.

Now

I still have those nights. Lying down, feeling like I did nothing today.

On those nights I no longer rush to believe the short summary in my head. I look first at what I left behind at the time. Those words are at least closer to what actually happened.

The little tool that began as a place to keep a few sentences eventually became Olomir.