Nobody Knows How Many Little Notes It Takes To Be Me Now

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Karen M. | Friday, September 6, 2026

Nobody knows how many little notes it takes to be me now, and that is the whole point. Nobody is supposed to know.

There are yellow notes all around my computer, one on the fridge, and one by the door. My phone is full of reminders for things I never used to write down, and I add a few more every week. I keep it hidden, the way you hide something you are ashamed of.

This morning I stood in the shower and stopped, because I could not remember if I had already washed my hair. I stood there and felt for it, trying to tell if it was wet from the water or wet from washing. I really did not know.

So I washed it again, just in case, and I told no one. You do not tell anyone that.

I am a grown woman with a checklist in her own shower.

For a long time I told everyone I had just gotten organized. That was my story. Look how on top of things I am. Look at my little system.

But I did not get organized. I got scared, and I got very good at hiding it.

The job nobody sees me doing

Let me walk you through a normal day, because I do not think anyone sees all of it. Not even the people who love me.

I wake up and check my phone before my feet even hit the floor, because I need to see the day written down before I trust myself to start it.

I get dressed and say it out loud to the empty room: keys, phone, the thing for the dentist. Saying it is safer than just thinking it now.

There is a note by the door I wrote the night before, so morning-me would not forget. I trust last-night me more than I trust right-now me, and that is a strange way to feel about yourself.

I drive somewhere, I park, and before I walk away with my arms full, I stop and take a photo of the pillar — B-2, the letter and the number — because twice now I have come out and had no idea where my car was.

That one scares me more than the rest, so I made it a habit. When it is a habit, it stops feeling like something is wrong.

At work the notes are the worst. I read the same email three times because the first read does not stick, and I cannot risk missing something. Someone I have known for years walks up, and for one whole second their name is just gone. I smile and let them keep talking until it comes back. I have gotten very good at the little pause that looks friendly but is really me searching.

I set reminders for things that make me feel small: move the laundry to the dryer, drink water, an alarm just to move wet clothes. A grown woman.

But none of that is the sad part. Here is the sad part.

This was never really about my memory. It is a job — a full‑time job I do in secret, all day, every day, covering for my own mind. I built a whole system just to seem like myself, and I told myself it was only my age.

When did it start? Honestly, I cannot even remember.

The woman I used to be without the notes

The notes are not the thing that hurts. Who I used to be without them — that is what hurts.

I used to keep my whole life in my head. Every birthday. The whole grocery list, in order, no paper. People handed me things to remember because I was safer than a note. You will remember, right? I always did.

I was the sharp one, and I can still remember being her. That is the part that gets me when it is quiet.

Because I am not really sad about my memory — I am sad about her. I have turned into a woman who needs a pile of notes just to feel like herself. And I would give anything to just be her again, with no notes at all.

I never said that out loud to anyone. There is no way to say it out loud.

Two things I was told, and both were wrong

When I finally let myself ask what was going on, I only had two answers. And I had been beating myself up with both of them.

The first was that it is just my age. That is the easy one, because it sounds soft and nobody asks you any questions when you say it.

But age does not work like that. Age is slow, and it comes for everything a little at a time. What I had came on fast, in a window of time I could almost put a date on. Age does not take a word from me this morning and leave a phone number I learned in 2009 sitting there, perfect. Something with a start date is not just age.

The second answer was worse — the one I think at two in the morning, in the dark, when everyone is asleep. What if it is me? What if this is the start of something bad? I have never said that one to a single soul.

So let me say this gently, because I needed someone to say it to me. Forgetting in a pattern — the same time of day, the same kind of thing — is not the same as a mind that is breaking. It acts different, and it started different.

So if it was not my age, and it was not me, then what was it? And why did nobody ever tell me where to look?

The thing nobody ever told me

One night, up late and searching in the dark like I always do, I found something that did not match anything I had been told. I almost closed the tab — so stay with me, because I nearly missed the answer.

It was about the gut.

I know how that sounds. But think about the last time you had to speak in front of people. Your stomach dropped before you said one word. Or think about bad news on the phone, when your gut goes cold half a second before the sentence even ends.

Nobody thinks that is weird. Every language on Earth has a phrase for a “gut feeling,” and not one of them means it as a joke about food.

So I already knew my head and my gut were linked — I had felt it my whole life. I had just never asked the next question: if my brain sends messages down to my gut, what is my gut sending back up?

Almost everything, it turns out.

Your gut and your brain are joined by a nerve called the vagus nerve. And here is the part that stopped me cold: most of the messages on that nerve go up, from the gut to the brain. Doctors even call the gut the “second brain,” because it has hundreds of millions of nerve cells of its own.

The chemicals your brain runs on to feel clear and calm are mostly not made in your head. Serotonin — the one you have heard of — is almost all made in your gut, not up where they scan.

And the fuel your brain needs, like your B12, your iron, and your magnesium, does not count when you eat it. It only counts when a healthy gut pulls it into you. A gut that is off pulls in almost none of it, so you can eat perfectly and still be running on empty in your head.

So when your gut is off, two quiet things happen at once. The fuel stops getting in, and the message it sends up the nerve stops being clean — it turns to noise. All day. Right at the part of you trying to hold onto a name.

That is what the fog is, from the inside: a brain running on half a tank, getting static from below.

Read that again, because it is the whole thing. I was not broken. I was not failing. I was not too old or too tired or too dramatic. I had a gut that was off, and a mind stuck below it, doing its best with whatever got through. And no one ever told me the two were linked.

I did everything right. I was just never told the whole story. It was not me. It was never me.

Why nothing I tried ever worked

This is also why the things I tried did nothing, and I have a cabinet full of them.

The “brain” pills and the memory games all aim at the head. But the head is where the fog lands, not where it starts. They were fixing the top floor for a problem coming from below.

Even the smart move, a probiotic or “just add good bacteria,” kept coming up short. Once I understood the gut, I finally saw why. You cannot grow a garden by throwing seeds on bad dirt. The dirt has to get better first. The gut has to settle before anything can grow.

So the answer was never more stuff aimed at my head, and it was not just piling good bacteria on top of bad dirt. It was fixing the dirt itself — which sounds obvious once someone finally says it.

The three plants people kept coming back to

Here is the strange, true thing I found next, and it is the part that finally made me trust any of this.

People who never met — in old China, old Egypt, Greece, and the old herb shops of Europe — all reached for the same thing when the body felt off: bitter plants. They shared no language, had no way to talk to each other, and no way to copy each other. And they all landed on the same few bitter plants anyway.

How? What were they all noticing?

Wormwood was the first. It is so bitter that its name became a word for bitter. It grew wild across Europe and Asia, and the old herb people reached for it the second the gut felt slow.

Clove was the little dried flower bud that traveled the old spice routes. People carried it across oceans, not just for the taste, but for what it did for the stomach.

Black walnut was the bitter green shell, not the nut. People on far-apart lands reached for it for the gut, just the gut.

Three plants, from three corners of the world, and one reason people kept coming back to them: the gut. People had been doing this for thousands of years before anyone even had a name for the gut-brain link.

And now we know why they all worked. Your gut is lined with tiny sensors that read bitter. Bitter is the one signal the gut is built to notice. Those old people were pulling the exact lever the gut answers to — they just did not know it yet. They did not know how it worked. They only knew it worked. Now we know both.

That is the thing that got past my guard, honestly. Something people have used for three thousand years, and that scientists have now gone back and studied, is a very different thing than a pill someone made up last year.

There was only one problem with the old way. For all those years, if you wanted this, you had to find the plants, get them ready, and choke down how bitter they are. Which is exactly why most people never stuck with it.

So the question I could not stop thinking was this: what if someone finally put all three together, in a form you could actually take, so you did not have to?

What I finally tried

I want to be honest — I did not want to be a woman who writes about a supplement. I have a whole cabinet of things that did nothing, and my guard was all the way up.

But the logic had me. If the fog comes from a gut that is off, you do not fix it from the neck up. You fix the gut. And you fix it with bitters — those same three plants, finally put together, in a form you can actually take.

That is what Clear Wellness is: wormwood, clove, and black walnut, in one small softgel you take before breakfast. No hunting for plants. No getting them ready. No choking anything down. The bitter part that made people quit for three thousand years is the whole point — it is the signal — and this just gives it to you in a way you can live with.

I did not buy it to “boost my memory,” and I want to be clear about that. I bought it to end the full‑time job — to stop covering for myself, and to stop being a woman who needs a pile of notes just to feel like herself.

And I will tell you exactly what happened, including the part where I almost quit, because I do not trust a story without that part.

There was no big flash. Nobody wakes up on day three brand new, and anyone who tells you they will is trying to sell you something.

Coming back to myself, one note at a time

The first week it was small. My stomach felt lighter after dinner, with less of that heavy evening feeling I had stopped even noticing. I almost did not connect it to anything.

Around day eight I decided it was doing nothing, and I nearly stopped.

Then a few days later I reached for the note pad, pen up, ready to write something down before I lost it — and I already had it. It was just there, in my head, where it used to live. I sat there with the pen over the paper and nothing to write.

You notice her come back backwards. Not all at once, but as a note you reach for and do not need.

My husband saw it before I would let myself. He looked at me across the kitchen one morning and asked what was different. He was not being sweet — he was confused, like something had changed and he could not name it.

Last week I peeled a note off my monitor, just one, and threw it in the trash. The yellow border is getting smaller. Nobody knows how many notes it takes to be me, but it is fewer than it was, and it is fewer every week.

She was in there the whole time, doing her best with whatever got through. Somebody finally gave her what she needed.

I am not the only one

When I finally started talking about it, quietly, other women told me the same thing. Here are a few of them, in their own words.

How do I get it?

Clear Wellness is only sold on their official website, not in stores yet. It is not cheap for a supplement, but it is covered:

That guarantee is the only reason I was willing to try one more thing. There was nothing to lose but the notes.

Check Availability & Claim the Bundle

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