Empty headed

I feel as if my brain is running on empty.  Or if it is actually empty.  Or maybe missing. 

I am surrounded by and work with and live in a neighborhood of people who have remarkable memories.  They know faces, names, and events about most everyone.  They see me and ask about something and I struggle to figure out what they are talking about, and sometimes even who they are.  I am horrible with names and faces and I am not sure why, but I am really, really horrible at remembering things about people.  Details of their lives and snippets of conversations we may have had do not stay with me in the same way they do with other people.  I haven't always been this way, but I am this way now and I wonder if I should be worried.

It's not a sudden thing, so I don't think it relates to an event or an occurrence.  I really think it's because I'm so busy and overwhelmed with everything I need to remember that I have learned to let the less important things go.  My job is extraordinarily detail-oriented and I have tons of things I need to remember and tasks I need to perform every day relating to a large number of people.  I am also one of those people who has a conversation running in her head almost constantly (not voices, just narration) so I exist in a distracted state.  Add that I am normally sleep deprived, and you have someone who struggles with remembering the minutiae of life while it appears everyone around her is tuned in.

I had a co-worker in another department stop at my desk and ask me today if I had bought any more tea.  I went absolutely blank at first, wondering why she would ask me that.  Then I recovered and remembered that I had a bottle of tea get stuck in the vending machine a couple of weeks ago just as she was walking by.  We worked on it a while and she ended up taking me to the Union to show me where to submit a request for a refund, and then where to buy them from a cooler rather than a vending machine so I am not continually losing my $1.25.  We had a nice visit, and I thanked her for her help.

Today when she stopped at my desk, that previous event was not on my radar.  I was probably working on something or had just finished working on something when I looked up, saw her, and the question about whether or not I had bought any more tea seemed out of the blue and random.  It wasn't random but it took my brain a few seconds to catch up and switch from track A to track B, especially since the tracks are so very different and move at such a different pace. 

I hate that I am not as tuned in to people as they are to me.  I don't want them to think I don't care about them, but that is hard to do when you are asking people about something you have already been told.  I wish I could open my head and let people see the squirrels and gears and perpetual motion machines that are running around in there so maybe they'd understand why I am what I am.  Years ago I read that Albert Einstein always wrote down phone numbers and notes to do things of the most simple nature.  He was asked how someone who was so smart couldn't remember basic things and he replied that he only kept those things in his head that needed to be there and those things he could write down and let go he did.  Genius, huh?