I have HSAM and it's driving me crazy

Hi M25, Sometimes I genuinely wish I could forget things. Every conversation. Every page I have ever read. Every face. Every insignificant detail that most people would never notice. They all remain somewhere in my mind as if nothing was ever deleted. I do not consciously decide to remember. It simply happens. My brain behaves like it believes everything deserves to be stored forever.

People hear about highly superior autobiographical memory and immediately imagine it as some kind of superpower. They picture perfect recall as though life becomes easier when nothing is forgotten. My experience has been almost the opposite. The problem is not remembering. The problem is never getting a break from remembering.

A random smell can suddenly reconstruct an entire day from years ago. A sentence someone says can instantly bring back the exact conversation where I heard something similar. A song is never just a song. It becomes a doorway to hundreds of memories arriving all at once. It is like living with thousands of tabs permanently open. None of them are loud on their own. Together they become overwhelming.

What makes it even stranger is that my mind naturally searches for connections between everything. One fact leads to another. One memory unlocks ten more. One question turns into an endless chain of ideas that keeps expanding without permission. It is difficult to explain to people because from the outside I probably look completely normal while internally my thoughts are racing through years of stored information every minute of the day.

Sometimes I wonder what silence feels like inside someone else's mind. Not physical silence. Mental silence. The ability to let a moment exist without instantly linking it to dozens of older moments. The ability to leave the past where it belongs instead of carrying it into every present experience.

The irony is that people often say they wish they had my memory while I quietly wish I could experience theirs for just one week. I want to know what it feels like to naturally lose details. To have memories gently fade instead of remaining vivid. To let painful experiences become blurry instead of feeling almost untouched by time.

It sounds ungrateful because I know there are advantages. I learn quickly. I rarely forget things that matter. But there is a cost that people rarely talk about. Your brain never truly rests because every new experience immediately attaches itself to an enormous network of old ones. Thinking stops feeling linear. It becomes an endless web where every idea points to a hundred others.

The hardest part is that there is no off switch. I cannot tell my mind that something is not important enough to keep. I cannot ask it to erase a memory that has already settled in. I cannot choose which details deserve to stay and which deserve to disappear. Everything simply accumulates.

Sometimes I honestly think forgetting is one of the greatest gifts the human brain has. It protects people. It filters the noise. It allows old pain to soften and unimportant details to vanish. When that process does not happen naturally life can become mentally exhausting in ways that are very difficult to describe. I do not feel like I am carrying memories. I feel like the memories are carrying me.