About the Creator

In 2017, my life was built on information. I was working as a Senior Network Engineer. My mind was my greatest tool. Friends and family would joke that I was a human calculator, able to perform complex math in my head with ease. My world was logical, structured, and filled with memories of my wife and two daughters. Then, a routine medical procedure changed everything.

The procedure itself went fine, but in the final moments, as the anesthesiologist was removing the breathing tube, a fluke accident occurred. A nerve in my throat was hit, causing it to close up completely. For roughly four and a half minutes, I went without oxygen.

I awoke to the terrifying sensation of drowning. There was no water, just an overwhelming panic and a desperate, primal need for air. In that blur of confusion and struggle, only one thought was clear: I had to fight. I was fighting for my life so my wife wouldn't be left without a husband, and my two girls wouldn't be left without their father.

The following weeks were the toughest. When I returned to work, the man who once designed complex networks couldn't perform the simplest tasks. I remember staring at a computer, unable to figure out how to change the wallpaper—a task I could have done blindfolded before. The fog was dense. Thoughts would evaporate the moment they formed. I had to completely relearn my profession, but more than that, I had to relearn how to learn. Information obtained from reading simply wouldn't stick.

The gaps in my memory were chasms. Most of my childhood was gone. Large parts of my own children's lives were just... blank. The memories that remained were like lonely islands in a vast, empty ocean—the birth of my youngest daughter, fragments of my wedding day. My brain, once a supercomputer, now struggled with simple addition.

A few months later, new challenges emerged. A faint ringing in my ears began, growing steadily in intensity until it became a constant companion. Then, the world started getting louder. Today, I live with full-blown tinnitus and hyperacusis, a condition that makes everyday sounds feel amplified by an excruciating 30 decibels.

My doctor, seeing the weight of it all, sent me to a counselor. And it was there, in that quiet office, that I faced the most unsettling discovery of all. She asked questions I'd never thought to ask, because as she said, "you don't know what you don't know." She helped me realize that the few memories I did have, even new ones created after the incident, had no emotion attached to them. They were like photographs without color, facts without feeling.

That night, I didn't spiral into despair. I went to my computer and started to code. I decided to build a practical tool for myself—an application designed to help me catalog the moments and details I was so desperate to hold onto. I began the process of recording important events, conversations, and small observations that I felt might connect to a forgotten memory.

I dedicated myself to researching memory creation and recall, implementing the concepts I learned directly into the app's features. As I used the application consistently, I started to notice a real difference. The connections I was logging were working. I was actually able to recover pieces of my past.

One day, for example, a simple scent triggered a connection I had logged, and a memory from my childhood—one I thought was completely erased—surfaced. Crucially, I wasn't just recalling a fact; for the first time in years, I could feel the emotion tied to it.

The application became an essential tool in my recovery, helping me externalize and organize the connections my brain was struggling to make on its own. Seeing how much this process has helped me, I've realized that it might be able to help others, too.

My goal now is to share this application with people who face similar struggles with memory, in the hope that it can provide them with the same kind of support it has given me.

I call it Membrandt. Just as Rembrandt (Painter) was a master of using light to pierce through shadow, my hope is that this app will pierce through the dark shadowed areas in your memory and shine a light on them to help lead you on your way to a memorable future. I felt it was a fitting name for a tool designed to bring our most precious memories from the darkness back into view.