In the past three or four days I have come up with at least four really good blog ideas. Not just titles or themes (which is often my starting point) but actual fleshed out ideas where I spent some time planning what I was going to write about and actually had, like, paragraphs and doodles and stuff mapped out in my head . . .
And therein lies the problem. Because, you see, dear reader, all of this was in my head. I came up with one idea while I was at work, and because I was at work I couldn't write it down. I was going to do that part on the bus on my way home (smart phones are fantastic things) but after a couple of difficult patient interactions, at the end of my day I finally sat down on the bus and had absolutely no idea what I'd been going to write, nor even what the topic was.
That's only one of, as I say, at least four examples (although, in fairness, I might have planned to write on the same topic four separate times -- it seems unlikely, but it's possible.) And that's only in the last few days. If I add it up over the years, then I'd say that I've probably lost 80% of my ideas (good bad or indifferent) because I didn't write them down before I forgot about them. That's blogs, poems, ideas for the novel I keep trying to write, essays when I was still at uni — pretty much everything.
This is something I really need to fix, but it's hard.
When I'm at work, I can't just stop and write things down because I'm working. Half the time I don't even have time to finish the work thing that I'm trying to do because there's another work thing with a patient who's physically in the store at that time, and so the thing that I was doing for the person from yesterday has to wait. I definitely can't interrupt by writing down personal stuff, even if it's just to quickly jot a blog topic and a couple of bullet points.
Another problem is that My Brain insists that I will remember, and wipes all past instances of forgetting from my mind . . .
. . . until such a time as I've forgotten . . .
. . . at which point My Brain's like:
and then:
And then I just feel sad.
I'm going to try to do better. I'm going to use the notepad in my phone more, and I'm going to try to use the voice memo feature (and try not to feel self-conscious about talking to myself in public).
Because knowing that I had four or more other topics planned out in my head, but have instead been reduced to writing about how I've forgotten what they were, is frustratingly silly.