This is going to sound ridiculous but if you find yourself in an altercation with someone you KNOW you’re going to have to describe later- like you’re being assaulted, threatened, mugged, whatever, and you’re not trained in giving descriptions, try and think of ways to insult their appearance before they fully leave your field of sight.
As someone who is horrific with faces and receives bad descriptions pretty often, most of yall are bad at it, and you focus on the wrong things and forget the rest. I personally find insulting people (silently in my head, even when I don’t mean it or I feel bad about it or I would never ever say it out loud) is a good way to retain details.
Like, IDEALLY I want to retain “Caucasian Male, average build, mid to late 50’s, balding brunet with large forehead wearing a backwards snapback hat, mirrored sunglasses, Hawaiian print muscle tank, gym shorts, adidas slide sandals, white socks, large silver chain necklace, large tribal-print tattoos on both forearms”, but stress has a way of fucking with your head and images are difficult to retain so “Y2K mid life crisis gym bro Bill Murray” has a way of sticking longer
And even if I forget him completely in the next five minutes, I’ll probably be able to pick him out of a crowd again in a couple hours
