At the time I drew this comic, I was living with my two cats in my attic apartment. I carried a keychain that contained three keys: one for my front door, one for my back door, and the other for a mysterious purpose that I never discovered.

Now that I’m thinking about that third key, it was most likely for my storage area, which I somehow managed to never find in the four years I lived in that apartment. But that’s besides the point.

I lost my keys a lot. I lost a lot of things a lot. And every time, it was a situation that spun out of control into me calling off work, reassessing my entire life, and sometimes having a panic attack and having to go to the emergency room for them to tell me, once again, maybe I should look into treating my anxiety.

It look a few hospital visits, but I did end up eventually finding a therapist. It turns out that I wasn’t just a moron who couldn’t handle the simplest task of keeping track of items. My brain was so full of thoughts, it just didn’t have the capacity to remember where I set my keys down. Who cares about keys when I have to think about three giant commissions, whether or not I’m going back to school, if I could make rent on time, which shipments were coming in at my job, if I was going to die alone - you get the idea. I was avoiding taking the time to process these thoughts to make sure they were even worth thinking about. I was barreling through them, in hopes I’d come out alive on the other side.

A common theme in my writings is slowing down. Sometimes I need to take a breather to untangle the thoughts in my head, and find the ones that need to be cut out. For me, a combination of years of therapy and medication helped. Lists, alarms, and finding a job in a less toxic environment also helped. It’s a work in progress.

I don’t lose things as often, because I’ve found tricks that work for me. I don’t forget things as often, because I know I need to write them down in a book I carry with me at all times. But when life gets too fast, and I can’t rely on those things, I just have to slow down.

I hope, if you’re a person who also loses and forgets, you can find tricks that help you, too. But just remember, everything doesn’t have to happen all at once. Take one step at a time. There are solutions, if you can slow down to figure them out. And if you need help from someone else to do that, that’s just as well.

Thanks for reading! Until next time.

xoxo Angela