Psychology says the people who forget names almost immediately after meeting someone aren’t rude, scattered, or bad with people, they’re the ones whose attention was already somewhere else in the introduction, reading the room, the body language, the mood underneath the words, and the name was the one piece of information that didn’t actually matter

I used to apologize for this constantly. Someone would introduce themselves and within thirty seconds their name was simply gone, dissolved into the general texture of the exchange like it had never arrived. I would spend the rest of the conversation in low-grade anxiety, trying to reconstruct it from context clues, while the person I was talking to remained warmly unaware that I had lost them almost immediately.

For a long time I thought this meant something unflattering about me. That I was scatterbrained...