For quite a while, I’ve been trying to figure something out. I go outside on the deck to smoke at night, and when I come in, I lock the door behind me. At first, I had a hard time remembering to lock the door, which was a pain in the ass. So I started paying more attention to it, and eventually had myself trained.
Except, at some point, quite some time ago, I would go to lock the door as usual and find that it was already locked. Bizarre. I would mentally back track - I had to unlock the door to open it, so clearly I was the one who locked it again. But when? I had just closed the door, and was about to lock it when I discovered it was already locked.
So I started running scenarios through my mind. Maybe, there was some physical thing happening when the door shut that somehow caused it to lock itself (just for clarity, it’s the standard turn the little thumb tab on the doorknob type lock). But repeated opening and closing of the door failed to produce this result. Maybe I was forgetting that I had locked it? Didn’t seem right, because it would have been seconds before. I tried walking outside and back in again, but I was way to self-conscious of the process for this to work. For weeks I puzzled over how this kept happening.
Finally, yesterday, I was interrupted as I came back in the house. Mid stride, I found myself closing the door - by holding onto the little thumb tab, pushing the door closed, and twisting the tab - all in one motion. Apparently at some point in training myself to lock the door, I had picked up this habit, and completely stopped realizing that I was doing it.
Yeah, I know. Mad as a hatter, blah blah blah.
Aside from this, I have other odd things that I always do, but never do consciously. Like making a dent in my soda can. I never fail to be slightly surprised to see the dent there, even though I know logically that I’m the one who made it. I just have no memory of doing it. And putting my cellphone in my purse at night. I’m about as scatterbrained as they come, but I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten a few blocks away from work to realize that I forgot to grab my phone, only to realize (usually about a block into the return trip to work) that is in my purse after all; I simply have no recollection of having put it there.
