I went back to that pain a few years ago after many years away from it. After a few months I got right back in the swing of things. Spending my days arranging and solving little memory ownership problems.I got to thinking: "This is programming". And I didn't really mind it.

But every so often I had to be honest and remind myself of what I had noticed at the beginning: Thinking about and managing memory is a colossal waste of time, even with smart pointers and the like - The machine can do that and has been able to do it efficiently for most things for a long time.