This is the first and only time I will likely ever talk about my personal life.  If you want to get to the Bitcoin part, please scroll down to the second part of my thread.  Anyway.  I will try to write the story as briefly as I can.

Because I never posted anything like this before, please keep in mind I may not feel comfortable for now replying to questions about this issue I am facing.  Feel free to ask any thing but remember I may not reply to some of your questions.  I do not even know why and how I am posting this.  I never felt comfortable doing it since it involves personal life but now I feel like I should write this thread so here we go.

In the three most recent years of my life, I started realizing something was going on with my mental health.  Initially, I ignored the issues but as the decline continued and became more apparent, it slowly started affecting my life and so I could not simply ignore it any more.

It started with me noticing I could not concentrate on my daily routine any more.  If some of the tasks took a few minutes many years before, they take me up to half an hour now.  If you ask me why, I just do not know.  I just realized common tasks are becoming harder and harder to complete.

Then I realized it was not only about tasks.  I actually had little signs of a mental decline in the past approximately five years, but I did not think it was this serious.  But I found out it was much worse than I expected.  I could not communicate as efficiently any more.  I found myself taking up to a minute to find a word.  I started forgetting where I put my keys and wallet every single day, or I started placing them in uncommon places.  I started missing appointments due to this, because sometimes it takes me up to a few hours to find them.  So I went to a local store and duplicated my keys and made sure I split my money in multiple wallets.  Guess what.  I lost two sets of keys for over a month AND one of my wallets.  One set of keys were attached to my entrance door all this time, the wallet was on my desk.  How in the hell did I never see them, I do not know.  Initially, I thought it was my significant other playing games on me.  Until they started getting mad and irritated on me because every day something was missing.  Either the keys, or the wallet.

I started forgetting the most important events.  Forgetting about dates and time.  I thought money was missing from my wallet, but then I found a bill from the day before which explained the missing money.  And most recently, I started to repeat questions over and over about simple things.  It is like you tell me something and the next second I forget.  So I ask you to repeat, then I forget again.  And so on.

In fact.  This started happening on Bitcoin Talk as well.  I read an information and soon I forget it.  But sometimes it is not like the entire piece is missing from my brain.  It is like someone fragmented it into many pieces and I know something about it, but I do not know enough to remember what it actually was.  Out of my time spent on this forum, I believe over half of it is spent re reading my recent posts and earlier replies of mine in threads because I do not remember what my argument was on a particular subject or whether I even posted in the thread at all.

Of course it becomes increasingly more irritating every time I realize this is going on.  And I try to calm myself down and focus on what is most important, but then I realize it is exactly the most important that I seem to now forget.  My family is very supportive now that they realize what is going on too.  So thanks to all of them.

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Anyway.  Recently, I took multiple exams and an MRI which led to the diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's Disease.  I could say this is life changing, but I am really trying not to.  By the way it looks, many disorders are progressing so much faster when the affected individual knows they have it so my plan is to try to slow it down while not caring much about its existence.  Sort of living with it while finding a way to make it work.

I recently started forgetting about my Cryptocurrency things.  Some passwords and where their backups were, where I put my Hardware Wallet, which disk was my Wallet on and more.  I do not remember what many of my recent transactions were for.  They are even labeled, believe it or not.  So I thought if there was a way to pretty much store everything in a place I can go search in every time I forget something, this may help.  My solution is therefore taking a notepad and writing everything down.  Word by word, with long explanation for every thing written.  Which is really heartbreaking for someone like me who would have never done this before for .. you guessed it, Privacy reasons.  I love this idea of having everything hidden and knowing there is no way some body else can put the pieces of the puzzle together.  But now I have to go against my passion, because this is the situation and I have to accept it and to find a way that works.  And then comes another issue I have to be really realistic about.  If my mental decline will progress significantly within a short time span, I have to make sure my relatives will pick up the pieces of my puzzles and work them out by themselves, without needing me.

So, here I am.  I just started teaching my closest relatives about Cryptocurrencies more than they ever knew before.  Kind of giving them a more in detail course so they know what to know, what to do and what to avoid doing.  I am still thinking about who to give the sensitive information about where my Seed Phrases are stored.  I have a pretty complicated setup, which I now have to unfortunately simplify.

To make sure my Alzheimer's is slowed down as much as possible, I am training my brain every single day.  I chose an exaggeratedly long password for my computer that I want to remember character by character.  I wrote it down somewhere safe too, so in case my brain goes nuts someone else can enter my computer too.  I plan to change this password every month, so I always have something to learn.  I bought myself all sorts of puzzles and brain training games, I started playing some sports and learning new languages and poems.  It is me having fun while trying to prevent or at least slow down the worst.

The saddest part of all of this is that I think I remember either LoyceV or o_e_l_e_o once said on Bitcoin Talk that the human brain should not be trusted because brain damages can occur and you never know when and how it can happen.  Well.  You were very right, and I am unfortunately witnessing it now by myself.  Never trust your brain.  It can play games on you and it is not fun at all.

The most interesting part of all of this is I can remember most of my past with an incredible lucidity.  Sincerely, I can close my eyes and think about my past and I can almost live it again through my own brain.  But the more recent past seems more and more blurry the closer I get to the year 2023.  You would think memory loss is going to affect your entire life's timeline.  The brain is such an interesting and intriguing thing.

But I am convinced I am not the only person with a declining mental health over here who is using Bitcoin.  I definitely do not want to leave Bitcoin, it is part of my fun.  It is part of who I am now.  Privacy as well.  So I will of course continue to be me, but I have to be conscious about the serious decline that I am facing.

So the purpose of this thread was actually to ask other Bitcoiners facing the same issue.  How do you work your brain out?  What kind of behavior are you using to make sure you overcome the difficulties of your mental health declining?  Do you have any tips for me?

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Regards,
PrivacyG