“The key to a happy life is a bad memory.”- Rita Mae Brown. I would be confident that this quote is said to me more often than it’s probably said to most people, and I didn’t even know who originally said it until I Googled it for this article. Whether it’s a reply after sharing …
Author Archives: mrp0055
Getaway Cars: Using HSAM to Escape the Present
It’s February 5th, and I am alive. I said this to myself over and over again while doing some mindfulness meditation before work. Mindfulness meditation has helped me substantially as I have adopted the practice over the past year. The goal is to be in the present moment. This is a challenge for me having …
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Is Dating with HSAM Different? I Don’t Know, You Tell Me.
The number one question I can always count on being asked, specifically, in a TV interview about HSAM, whether it’s a local news segment or 60 Minutes, is: “What is your dating life like?” It’s always towards the middle of the interview. The person interviewing me will pause and say “so…I have to ask…”, and …
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We All Need Somebody to Lean On
I remember the moment I realized my mental illness was a joke. On August 14th, 2011 I was in Door County, Wisconsin with a group of my high school friends. For those of you who are not familiar with Door County, think of it as the Hampton’s of the upper Midwest. Although I knew a …
Indispensable Objects: My Journey of Overcoming OCD
One of the first things I learned becoming a mental health advocate in college was that every personal story about a mental illness needs to end with treatment. Why? Well, if we just share stories of our battles with mental health issues and stop at the parts where we felt defeated, our narrative doesn’t give …
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Wearing Pigtails and Hoarding Movie Tickets: Living with OCD
In order to figure out where my future could go with HSAM, it turned out I had to start by digging deeper into my past. I want to start by telling you about the bain of my existence in Catholic elementary school: card changes. Did anyone else have these? It was a discipline system made …
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Getting Tested
The word “test” has meant a lot of different things in my life. As a student it was taking an exam in history or math to measure how much I had retained from class lectures and homework assignments. As a competitive figure skater, testing meant skating in front of a panel of judges who determined …
Inside My Head
What does it look like inside your head? I am asked this very question a lot in interviews, especially by psychologists. The first time I asked myself this question was when I started watching Disney Channel’s Lizzie McGuire. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, we see Lizzie, a blonde, bubbly middle …
How I Found Out
I always knew I was different. I realized at a young age other people couldn’t remember the date Easter fell on four years ago or what day the Super Bowl was in 2007. Maybe the 2007 Superbowl stands out to me because my father was a diehard Chicago Bears fan living in a house with …
HSAM: An Ability with Blessings and Curses
One of the reasons I didn’t find out I had HSAM until college was because, generally, no one really knows what HSAM is. When I have gone to see a new therapist because I moved somewhere, I find myself telling them, “oh yeah, I also have this memory thing”. And when I say the technical …
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Living with Total Recall 