I had two really good concert tickets. The kind where you’re excited enough about the seats that you keep thinking about how good the seats are. They were also definitely not cheap lol.
Then my husband and I realized we had the weekend wrong. Not the time. Not a small scheduling conflict. We’d apparently been mentally planning around an entirely different weekend, and by the time we figured it out, we already had something else we couldn’t move.
So I tried to sell them. Nothing. I lowered the price. Still nothing. Eventually I was emailing people basically saying, “Does anyone just want these?” because watching two expensive seats sit empty was somehow going to bother me more than giving them away.
There’s no graceful transition from being extremely pleased with your expensive concert tickets to begging literally anyone to please remove them from your life.
The part that bothered me was how much I cared
I’ve always assumed the things I forget are going to be the things I don’t care that much about. An appointment I made six months ago? Sure. Something administrative? Obviously.
But I was excited about this. We’d talked about it. We bought the tickets. They cost enough that you’d think my brain might have flagged the date as information worth protecting.
Apparently excitement doesn’t come with calendar accuracy.
I have ADHD, and I do this constantly where I decide, with absolutely no supporting evidence, that something is too important for me to forget. “I’ll remember that.”
Will I? Because we have data now.
I already had a calendar reminder
I already had the Skylight Calendar I’m obsessed with when this happened. The giant calendar I bought specifically because I don’t want to keep our entire life in my head.
So yes, I’d already purchased the solution to this exact genre of problem. Still got the concert weekend wrong.
What I realized afterward is that I sometimes confuse knowing something with actually putting it somewhere Future Me can still find it. If we talked about it enough, bought something for it, or I was excited about it, it felt handled.
Apparently “handled” can also mean “I feel very confident this information will magically remain available to me for several months.” The tickets made me significantly more suspicious of that feeling.
I still think it all the time. “I’ll remember.” Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. I don’t feel the need to run the experiment anymore.
If the date matters, it goes in the calendar while I’m looking at it. If my husband needs to know, it goes somewhere we both see. If there’s a confirmation email, I don’t assume the existence of the email means the information has somehow transferred into my long-term memory.
This isn’t revolutionary. It did apparently require two very good concert tickets to get through to me.