The JavaScript Graveyard in Your Head

You ever open a file you wrote yesterday and feel like someone secretly refactored it overnight? The comments look familiar, the variable names ring a bell, but your brain insists this is the first time you have ever seen this code in your entire life. Meanwhile Buffer is spinning like a tiny loading gremlin, muttering that you definitely knew this once.

For non-dev folks, imagine the mental equivalent of discovering your keys inside the fridge. Or picking up a book you swear you have read, only to realise you remember one random line perfectly and nothing else. That is the vibe. Neurodivergent memory is pattern hungry, novelty obsessed, and allergic to cold storage.

So today we are taking a gentle stroll through the JavaScript Graveyard in your head. The place where forgotten functions rest, misplaced syntax wanders free, and every moment of confusion becomes a sign that your brain is wired for creativity, not complete recall.

There is a quiet truth most neurodivergent people learn early on. You are not actually forgetting skills, tools, or bits of JavaScript. You are putting them into a mental folder your brain refuses to label properly. The moment you switch tasks, close a tab, or lose the emotional spark, the whole thing slides out of view like something you meant to remember on the way to the kitchen.
For devs this feels like losing access to a variable you definitely declared. For non-dev readers it is the classic moment where you open the fridge and forget why you are standing there with purpose. Same experience. Different aesthetics.

When your brain garbage collects your knowledge

Developers talk a lot about memory leaks, but neurodivergent brains often do something funnier. They aggressively garbage collect. They tidy up mental space without warning. Yesterday you knew how reduce worked. Today your brain decided that information was optional and replaced it with something irrelevant yet important like "Do we still have that one snack I hid behind the cereal box?"
For non-dev folks, imagine doing a deep tidy of your house, feeling proud, and then realising you accidentally threw away the one thing you actually needed. Not because you are careless, but because your brain prioritises novelty and emotional charge over practicality.
Ping likes to explain that this is not about intelligence. It is about priority signals. Your brain remembers what feels meaningful, stimulating, or repetitive. That is why you can recall Pokémon lore from 2002 in perfect detail but forget how to fold a fitted sheet or how blinking works.

When context changes, your memory changes too

Most neurodivergent people experience something called context collapse. When your environment, mood, or energy level shifts, your recall shifts with it. You essentially reboot into a slightly different version of yourself, with a slightly different save file.

For developers this makes old code feel like it was written by a polite stranger. For non-devs it shows up as suddenly forgetting how to continue a hobby you used to love, or losing your entire train of thought because someone asked you a simple question.

This is why returning to a project, routine, or task often feels like trying to remember a dream you had last week. You know it happened, and you know you cared, but the details have floated off somewhere behind the clouds.

You are not bad at remembering. You are excellent at improvising.

Zap would like to point out that neurodivergent people excel at pattern recognition. We might not remember the exact method name, the exact steps of a recipe, or the exact way we handled something last month. But we remember the shape of the solution. We remember what made sense. We remember what annoyed us. We remember the vibe.
That is not traditional memory. It is lived memory. Dynamic. Adaptive. And honestly pretty powerful.
The graveyard in your head is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that your brain rebuilds what it needs when it needs it. You do not store everything. You regenerate it. Like a chaotic AI model trained on instinct, emotion, and late night googling.

The power move is accepting the reset

Every time your brain forgets something, you get a chance to relearn it with more clarity. You notice new details. You find better shortcuts. You see what past you missed. Sometimes you even impress yourself.

This cycle of forgetting and rediscovering is not a barrier. It is part of the neurodivergent creative loop. It keeps curiosity alive. It keeps learning flexible. It keeps the world feeling interesting instead of stale.

Your brain is not an archive. It is a playground. And the JavaScript Graveyard is simply one corner where old sandcastles fade so you can build new ones with fresher eyes.

If your brain loves to bury old code, you are not alone. It is part of how neurodivergent minds work, learn, and reboot. The next time you forget something you knew last week, take it as a sign of a flexible mind, not a failing one. You are allowed to relearn things as many times as you need.

Until next time,Simen