One of my biggest sources of anxiety is forgetting things. It’s why I carry my bullet journal around the house. I write down everything. Everything. From things I need to do to quotes from books to memories from childhood (that must have come into my mind for some important reason).

Recent entries: A quote from A Case for Jamie by Brittany Cavallaro, a statement about how much I love it when Linus’s ears flicker while he sleeps, a reminder to check the miles on my car, and a single word: colophon.

I’m so scared that if I don’t take a moment to write something down that I’ll spend double that time feeling bothered that I’m forgetting something. So I take minutes out of my day to jot down the name of a resort in the Maldives (Soneva Jani), a phrase I heard in a Downton Abbey episode (“All Sir Garnet”), and create a reminder to purchase a gift for a friend.

It makes me feel like everything is neatly in place inside my mind.

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The New York Times points out that there are many brain training options out there for remembering things — from chunking to memory palaces — but few active methods for trying to forget things. Mitigate the stress thinking about an event makes us feel — absolutely. But actively forgetting that said event ever happened — not so much.

The New York Times writes, “To intentionally forget is to remember differently, on purpose. Importantly, for scientists and therapists, intentional forgetting also may be an ability that can be practiced and deliberately strengthened.” They explain the forgetting strategies along with forgetting benefits.

I sat with the article for a while because forgetting brings me so much anxiety; even forgetting unpleasant things. I’m fascinated by memory exercises and party tricks like remembering the first 100 digits of pi, and I never thought about how we don’t have corresponding exercises for forgetting. Forgetting is just something that happens, something we need to fight against. Except that sometimes we remember things we don’t really want to remember.

Food for thought.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I don’t drink. I have, on average, one drink every year or two, so bars are kind of lost on me. Which isn’t a big deal now, but was a big deal when I was in my twenties and most of my friends wanted to get together at a bar. I love this idea of alcohol-free bars. It’s everything you expect in a bar, except with fancy mocktails instead of cocktails. And it’s not that you are not drinking. It’s that everyone around you is not drinking, too. You’re all there for the mocktails or alcohol-free beer.

Why? “In cities like New York and London, where bars often function as second living rooms for apartment dwellers with little space, an alcohol-free nightlife option can appeal to people who, for whatever reason, would prefer not to drink.”

I checked and we don’t have one in DC yet; at least not one that functions like Getaway in the article.

But I would totally go and have a date night at an alcohol-free bar. Would you?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

The Washington Post has a brilliant opinion piece about regulating pregnancy, which, by default, talks about infertility as well. People don’t understand how pregnancy works. They don’t understand that you can’t move an ectopic pregnancy. They don’t understand that you can’t pee on a stick immediately after sex and know whether or not you’re pregnant. They don’t understand how cycles work or periods happen or uteruses function because they won’t speak about these things. They’ll only regulate them. Or, at the very least, form an opinion within their lack of information.

She sums up the whole problem in a single sentence: “There’s another reason that has nothing to do with the law: If you don’t understand how female bodies work, you might end up believing some really harmful things about women.”

Go read the whole piece. (But not the comment section.)

I ended up needing to go back into my old blogspot website this week, which I haven’t been in since building this space in 2009. It felt like I was strolling through a ghost town, except it wasn’t really a ghost town since all of that old content migrated over here. For three years, I wrote there, and for ten years I’ve written here. Triple the length of time that I wrote over there, but that space feels so much like home still. I’m not sure what that means.

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Speaking of looking backwards, Measure of Love is on sale for the next two weeks for only 99 cents. It’s the same price on every e-book platform. So… grab a copy for the beach? For a friend? For someone who wants to hear about the olden days of blogging?

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “What Does a Mother Look Like” (Mrs. Spit)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about the outer calm and the inner turmoil. She made it through Mother’s Day weekend, but then found herself emotional when she started to pack up her house for a move. She writes, “As we dis-assembled our furniture and took art off the walls, it felt as though we are completely pulling apart our lives. Which actually was the whole idea, I guess… It’s just I’m starting to get cold feet about it all.” It’s about crumbling internally so you can build something new.

Risa Kerslake also has a post about Mother’s Day; though this year she’s pregnant. In the past, she has always had a moment where she cries in the bathroom, and this year she didn’t. She describes that change in Mother’s Day: “There’s a lot of joy and gratefulness and indescribable love that comes with it, but every Mother’s Day, I allow myself those moments in the bathroom.”

Lastly, CD1 Again ties off her blog with a goodbye post. She goes all the way back to 2008, so it’s bittersweet, even if she hasn’t been blogging as of late. She writes, “Thank you to everyone who ever stopped here and said hi or offered support when I was at my lowest, so sure I was worthless because my uterus didn’t work. It meant more than I can ever convey here with just words. I looked back and the anguish I read in old posts just hurts, but it helped shape who I am now. I’m leaving all of the posts here for anyone who needs them.” Go read the whole post and say goodbye.

The roundup to the Roundup: Spending time in the past. Measure of Love is on sale. Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 10th and 17th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I am a superfan of Carolyn Hax’s column. I differentiate myself from a regular fan because I even read her daily column when I’m out of the country. So I’ll skip the Skimm for several weeks, but I’ll never skip Hax, even if it means accessing her column over super-slow portable wifi.

Here are ideas from three recent columns that I bookmarked.

Advice One

This was an old column they re-ran a month or two ago about trust.

The need to control is really just a failure to trust. You have to drive because so-and-so will be reckless; you have to keep your mate in sight or else s/he’ll cheat; you have to do everything yourself because underlings won’t be as competent . . . stop me when this sounds familiar.

A failure to trust, meanwhile, is really just a triumph of fear. Fear of crashing, heartbreak and failure in the examples I just gave, but it’s all one biggie — fear of the unknown. Specifically, that you won’t be able to handle any outcome that deviates from the one you’ve envisioned.

Which means the person you don’t trust is yourself. Right?

Isn’t that freakin’ brilliant? Need to control = failure to trust. Failure to trust = triumph of fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown = lack of trust in your own ability to cope. Seeing it spelled out that clearly made me understand my desire to control the world.

Advice Two

The next was a few weeks ago. Another trust situation, but this time it’s being upset by someone’s history.

You haven’t changed. What has changed is your girlfriend’s understanding of who you are. That understanding changed because you were honest and transparent about your history. Her response to your transparency was to choose not to be transparent with you. Or trust you … Your history made you who you are, the person who chose her — no small thing — and the person who has been honest with her throughout.

It didn’t make me see the world differently, but I just loved how she led the person through that answer.

Advice Three

This was just a little nugget in a column last week about a person wondering if their boyfriend was losing interest:

Being good to yourself is how you learn to recognize the sensation of someone being good to you.

LOVE THAT. Every single person needs to be taught how to be good to themselves so they can find their boundaries.

What good advice have you read lately?