[shippage]

It's strange seeing posts about aphasia on HN every so often. When I was a teen, I suffered a stroke secondary to a TBI that had happened a few days before. As a result, I developed global aphasia and lost my internal monologue. I don't think in words anymore except when I'm either conversing with or thinking about conversing with someone else. To this day, English feels like a second language to me even though it's my native language, and I still have lingering anomic aphasia.

Some days are better than others, and it does affect my ability to code on worse days because I can't remember the names of even common API functions (thank goodness for IDE suggestions!), and if I'm in a lot of meetings in a day, I'm utterly exhausted by the end of the day from the mental effort of trying to tease out meaning from context when there are words in the middle of sentences that have no meaning for me. It's not really something I talk about, so only my husband and my doctor knows about it.

Probably the most annoying part, besides the embarrassment when I can't remember a common word, is the way my brain keeps wanting to file words in the same slot that doesn't work. So I see a word again, know that I used to know what it meant, look it up and for maybe 30 minutes if I'm lucky, I'll remember the word and its definition, but later that day, I'll have forgotten it again.

At least for me, it feels humiliating to forget even common words like "ice" or "screwdriver," and end up saying something unintelligible like, "Could you bring me the thing for the thing so I can do the thing?" along with vague gestures that my husband, to his patient credit, often understands.

In the end, I just have to quietly power through and do the best I can, and I suspect others in the same boat keep quiet about it, too, so I wanted to finally talk about it. To all of you, stay strong, be kind to yourself, and take the time you need to process information.

[zeryx]

This is me all the time, but as I've gotten older I realized extensive note taking is extremely helpful for work. I can't recommend it enough for people like me

[sirtaj]

Nothing changed my work life more positively than having a notebook and pen with me at all times. "This is simple, I'll remember it, no need to write it down"... no you won't.

[shippage]

Fully agree with both of you, especially about writing even simple things down, because it's usually the simple thing I didn't write down that trips me up.

The hardest part is making sure my notes are always up to date, which sometimes means rewriting them to make it easier to tell at a glance what my responsibilities for the day will be.

I've also found that I sometimes remember the first letter of a word even if I can't remember the word itself, so I also keep an index by letter of medium-term information. For instance, I might remember that a contact's name for a work project starts with S, so I flip to S and see his name is Steven. It'll also be filed in a project-related contacts list so if I can't remember the first letter, I can at least skim until I see the name.

I've just started experimenting with transcribed voice notes combined with a local LLM to help me write high-level summaries as well as helping create the index. Still needs work, though. I always have to double-check the outputs to make sure the LLM didn't miss anything important.

Side note: LLMs, even relatively small ones, are really good at helping me find a word via a vague conceptual description of what I want to say. Quite helpful, because on bad days I run into a missing word several times a paragraph when writing. When that fails, I use a related words site and drill down finding closer and closer words until I see the one I wanted.

[zeryx]

I learned thinking too much about it makes it worse. Just have to do lists that are ephemeral that you'll rewrite and start over 5-10 pages from now. Just pencil and nice small notebooks that are portable is more important than my laptop or phone most of the time for work

[sirtaj]

I try to keep things simple because any attempt at a complex/heavy process will never become a habit. But what I find is, even the act of writing something down means I will remember it.