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There are various ways of organizing your life.

I, for instance, used to rely solely on a spectacular memory that could cycle through a wide array of topics and ideas to order them in a fashion that would allow me to function. I could articulate those ideas relatively easily, meaning I could usually communicate what I was doing and why.

Anymore I just settle for being unorganized. I now have a Swiss-cheese memory that can cycle through about three topics and ideas and arrange them in the least logical fashion. This leads to situations where I start talking to other people in the middle of a thought, jump to another thought, finish my statement by doing something strange, and then peer meaningfully at the person I was addressing.

This strategy has the pleasant side effect of meaning people at work try not to have any reason to talk to me, but it has led to my brain attempting to compensate by repeating everything I say back to myself, sometimes with notes. It can be a little jarring to be talking to someone while your brain plays back exactly what you just said on a five second delay. It is especially jarring when you have the realization halfway through a conversation that you sound like an idiot. And not just any idiot, but the jabbering, frothing kind of idiot who isn’t really wrong because they aren’t actually making any sense.

By way of illustration here is a fictitious example: While your mother is trying to relax by watching TV, I might walk into the room, sit down to read a book and say something like “How much do you think it would cost to build a Faraday cage in the basement?” As she attempts to get her bearings and begin to navigate this question, I perhaps could follow up with “I think this winter might be cold.” Immediately after this I would probably turn off the light, and then open my book and peer at it, trying to figure out why the pages are hard to read. Your mother would quietly sigh and wonder about the exact requirements to have me committed.

While I navigate the world of personal organization with grit and intuition, your mother makes lists. It is something she does without thinking about it. She has notebooks in various locations of the house that contain nothing but lists. She keeps the old lists, because they are useful templates for the next time she needs to make a list.

However, she never displays her lists. They are “private” things, even when they do not contain any information that would be considered private. Her lists are buried things, for her own use and understanding.

You seem to have followed neither of us in this manner. You have an incredible memory and seem to enjoy cycling though ideas and topics faster than the adults in the room can follow. This gift, unfortunately, is not used for organizational purposes. Instead, you rely on this ability to create a path of destruction through the house that is unparalleled by all but the most fearsome natural disasters.

Interestingly, you have also started to make lists. You can’t actually write yet, but that hasn’t stopped you. And just to be diametrically opposed to your mother, your lists are public things. You leave them all over the house. You write them on sticky notes and hang them places where they are obviously meant to be seen; I assume they are there to remind me of something I have forgotten.

For instance, these little notes are sprinkled around my office, stuck to various pieces of furniture: