If you were on flight BA2279 from London to Vancouver earlier this month, I owe you an apology. You were unwittingly drawn into my ongoing investigation into why I keep forgetting things.
Wedged between Neil and a stranger for nine hours, I had the whole flight planned. A couple of films, a book, mindlessly clearing my inbox, and a decent doze somewhere over Greenland. Four hours in, feeling myself begin to drift, I took my AirPods out of my ears and reached for the case.
No case.
Why do I keep forgetting things? It’s a question I have been asking myself rather a lot lately. At my stage of life, menopause is real. So is the forgetfulness that comes with it, and to spare myself the look my children now give me every time I begin a sentence with, ‘Where’s my…’, I have become very deliberate about where I put things.
A safe place, chosen with great care
They couldn’t have gone far, right? It wasn’t as though I’d been playing musical chairs or running laps through economy. There was me, and there was my seat. That was it.
I searched the seat pocket in front of me, my husband’s seat pocket, my actual seat, my trouser pockets, the floor, my bag, and the child’s shoes under the seat behind. For the sake of thoroughness, I emptied out the Tesco bag I had brought specifically for our rubbish, which tells you everything about my ongoing campaign to stop menopause brain making a fool of me. Nothing.
Thankfully one can rely on Apple’s ping. One tap, and I could hear it. In fact, the entire plane could hear it. So I pinged it again, and again, and then a good deal more than was socially acceptable, because somewhere in that cabin was a small white box and I was not going to be beaten by it.
So we continued searching. The people in front looked. The people behind looked. A passing gentleman, bored or nosey or possibly both, helpfully pointed out that the sound wasn’t coming from the floor. So the search moved to the overhead lockers.
Then the lights came on
Husband of the year then suggested that it may be on me, as though a woman who had spent four hours tracking the precise location of every single item she brought onto the aircraft might somehow have overlooked her own pockets. The audacity.
Then, amid the pinging, the upended seats and the newly woken children, something in my brain clicked. No warning, no working out, just sudden and complete clarity. Where that clarity had been for the previous hour is anyone’s guess.
The AirPod case, as it turns out, was in a very safe place, … deposited intentionally by me.
In my bra.
Relief and embarrassment landed on my face at the same moment, and I had no choice but to share my revelation with the eager onlookers whose chief entertainment, for what felt like an eternity, had been the hunt for those AirPods.
Why we forget things when our heads are full
There was relief. Yes. There was also immense embarrassment, because in front of me sat a plane full of eager passengers waiting for the epic end to our shared adventure.
For me, it was hormones. For you it might be something else entirely. Small children, teenagers, a job that follows you home, or parents who need more of you with each passing year. Whatever is filling your head, there always seems to be room for one more of someone else’s worries.
What I’ve been turning over since we landed
I’ve thought about that flight more than any AirPods case deserves. Four things have stayed with me.
The case was never lost, so why do I keep forgetting things?
When I retraced it, I had done exactly what I’d been trying to do all flight. I’d been careful. I tucked the case somewhere it couldn’t possibly go astray, and then my busy brain filed the decision in the Deal with Later pile and never went back for it.
That’s what a heavy mental load does. It doesn’t make you less capable. It means your head is running dozens of tabs at once, most of them for other people, and eventually one small thing slips through. If you keep forgetting things in the middle of all that, it says far more about how much you’re holding than about who you are.
So the question I’m sitting with is this. What is your head holding that it doesn’t need to hold alone?
Check the place you’re most sure about
I had checked myself. I would have sworn to it in court. That certainty is exactly what kept me searching everywhere else for the best part of an hour.
Many of us do a version of this with far more than AirPods. When something feels off, we search every seat pocket for the answer. We look at the children, the job, the partner, the schedule, the state of the house. The one place we skip is ourselves, because we’re sure we already know what’s going on in there. Sometimes the most useful question is the one Neil asked, however irritating it was to hear. Have you checked yourself?
Let people help you look
Half that plane helped me search, and the man who thought the sound was higher up was right. I’d have found the case a great deal sooner if I had listened to him instead of taking a torch to the carpet.
Women who carry a lot are often experts at managing alone. We compensate. We write things down twice. We keep the whole system running in our heads and say nothing when it starts to creak, because saying something feels like admitting we can’t cope. Other people see what we can’t, though. Saying it out loud, to a partner, a friend or a coach, turns a private weight into a shared puzzle, and shared puzzles get solved faster.
Laugh first, then be kind
The story is funny because I let it be funny. There was another version available to me in that moment, the one where the running commentary sounds like what is wrong with you, how could you be so stupid. Most of us know that voice well. It arrives quickly after we forget something, snap at someone, or fall short of our own impossible standards, and it is almost always harsher than the moment deserves.
Humour got me through that aisle. Kindness towards myself is what I’m practising for next time, when there’s no cabin full of strangers to make it funny.
If this feels familiar
Perhaps you’re also wondering why you keep forgetting things. You might be a woman holding a demanding career together, a mother with no room left to think, or simply someone who feels a bit stuck and can’t put her finger on why. Sometimes what helps most is a proper conversation with someone who knows how to untangle what’s going on underneath it all. That’s the work I do. If any of this landed a little close to home, get in touch and we’ll talk.
Also, check your bra
* If you enjoyed this, there’s a whole book of it. I’m Fine: What Three Children Taught Me About Emotions and Parenting is my book about the feelings we carry while getting on with everything else, and what my children taught me about handling them badly, and then a little better. Considerably fewer AirPods. You can find it here.
