I had an interesting experience at an internship where I spontaneously developed a very good ability to remember names lol. Recently (nearly a decade later) I’ve been diagnosed AuDHD so take from that what you will.
But basically I’d always felt fairly antisocial and consequently not great at remembering names. Then I had this internship with a cohort of 100 or so other interns for the summer, and it hit me and I was like, “actually, I do hope I can make friends this summer. I want to make connections and have people like me. And a simple way I can do that, I think, is learning people’s names quickly and using their names so they know I remember them.” And bizarrely after having this epiphany, it was like my hyper attention activated whenever I met a new person and I realllly focused on pairing their names with a face. And I’d estimate I had close to 90-95% recall after just one or two interactions since then. It’s something I still needed to, and still need to, make a conscious effort in but I could do it.
Not to say that this sort of reframing would work for everyone or even most, and definitely not with people who have like real face blindness issues, but it was fairly enlightening for me personally. I realized that at least some of the social skills I’m bad at, I might just be bad at because I’ve convinced myself I don’t care to be good at them. And lol I still don’t care to be good at a lot of them. But it did feel a little super power-y that I could activate a skill like that if I just got myself to care about it.
You know, I just had the epiphany yesterday that the reason I’m so bad at remembering new names and faces is probably because it hasn’t been worth my while to in probably a decade, haven’t made any new connections other than coworkers (and even then). But it’s a vicious cycle, it becomes hard to connect because I don’t know their name and barely recognize their face. It’s getting worse too. Friends of friends will walk up like “hey oops, how’s it been? Haven’t seen you since blah-blah-blah” … but I have no idea who they are. I can tell that I’ve seen them before, and I can guess from the context who I know them through, but I don’t know them even though they seem to know me. Fucking scary, just losing that information.
I had an interesting experience at an internship where I spontaneously developed a very good ability to remember names lol. Recently (nearly a decade later) I’ve been diagnosed AuDHD so take from that what you will.
But basically I’d always felt fairly antisocial and consequently not great at remembering names. Then I had this internship with a cohort of 100 or so other interns for the summer, and it hit me and I was like, “actually, I do hope I can make friends this summer. I want to make connections and have people like me. And a simple way I can do that, I think, is learning people’s names quickly and using their names so they know I remember them.” And bizarrely after having this epiphany, it was like my hyper attention activated whenever I met a new person and I realllly focused on pairing their names with a face. And I’d estimate I had close to 90-95% recall after just one or two interactions since then. It’s something I still needed to, and still need to, make a conscious effort in but I could do it.
Not to say that this sort of reframing would work for everyone or even most, and definitely not with people who have like real face blindness issues, but it was fairly enlightening for me personally. I realized that at least some of the social skills I’m bad at, I might just be bad at because I’ve convinced myself I don’t care to be good at them. And lol I still don’t care to be good at a lot of them. But it did feel a little super power-y that I could activate a skill like that if I just got myself to care about it.
You know, I just had the epiphany yesterday that the reason I’m so bad at remembering new names and faces is probably because it hasn’t been worth my while to in probably a decade, haven’t made any new connections other than coworkers (and even then). But it’s a vicious cycle, it becomes hard to connect because I don’t know their name and barely recognize their face. It’s getting worse too. Friends of friends will walk up like “hey oops, how’s it been? Haven’t seen you since blah-blah-blah” … but I have no idea who they are. I can tell that I’ve seen them before, and I can guess from the context who I know them through, but I don’t know them even though they seem to know me. Fucking scary, just losing that information.