Here's something memory does that nobody warns you about — and once you see it you can't unsee it. When you try to recall how the last few weeks went, the mood you're in *right now* does the colouring. It reaches back and tints the whole stretch to match today.
On a low day, you'll remember the past few weeks as rough, heavy, hard going. On a good day you'll look back at the *exact same weeks* and remember them as basically fine. Same events, same days, genuinely the same stretch — but two completely different summaries, and the only thing that changed is the weather *you're* in at the moment of remembering.
You're not misremembering what happened — you're having it quietly re-tinted by your present state. And the reason it's so sneaky, sneakier than plain forgetting, is that it doesn't *feel* like distortion. It feels like a calm, level-headed summing-up. 'No, I'm being fair, it really has been a tough month' feels like clear sight — when it might just be today talking.
You're not misremembering what happened — you're having it quietly re-tinted by your present state.
You can't catch it from the inside, because from the inside the tint *is* the picture. There's exactly one account that doesn't get repainted by today: a line you wrote *on the day itself*, in that day's actual state, before this morning's mood could reach back and recolour it. That's the quiet value of jotting one short note as you go — not because it's more detailed than memory, it isn't, but because it's *immune to today*.
It tells you what was true *then*, not what right-now says was true then. That's why 'I think it's been a bad month' and the notes can flatly disagree — and the notes are the honest one, because they're the only version mood didn't get to touch. And what you do with what you notice is a conversation for your prescriber, not the app.