Memory Holes*

I was at the yoga studio a few weeks ago and ran into somebody I went to college with.  He was talking to someone else but we made eye contact and nodded and he looked like he was going to say something to me but I blanked on who he was and looked away, so he dropped it.  At least I think that's what happened--it all took about 1.8 seconds, so who knows.  He left a minute later and by then I had thought of his name and remembered where I knew him from, and I dropped him a line on Facebook later to apologize for being weird.  We weren't best friends or anything, but I didn't want to communicate that I didn't care, either.

This happens to me all the time since moving back here.  On the one hand, I know it's just par for the course, and that it's impossible for everybody to remember everyone, especially after not seeing someone for twenty years.  Awkward interactions are going to happen.  So I try to cut myself some slack, and if I don't remember someone, I try to say so and have a good interaction anyway.

But in the back of my mind this forgetting thing causes a lot of anxiety.  And it's mostly around the fact that there are these gaping holes in my memory where I seem to have lost whole chunks of my life, for no good reason I can tell.  More importantly, I've lost memories of people, or time with people I really loved.

This loss is exacerbated by the fact that I have a lot of good friends and family who have what seem to me to be eerily precise memories for fantastic quantities of detail--names, faces, events, jokes, lyrics, movies.  They remember their third grade classmates, or the neighbors they lived next to in junior high.  They remember boyfriends and parties and hijinks and teachers and outfits.  And they remember just way more than I do, both in terms of quality and quantity.

It's not like I have nothing.  I have some very strong, very pointed memories from the first 35 years of my existence.  It's just that there aren't very many of them.

What is going on here?

It's not that I'm dumb, right?  I mean, I retain all sorts of crazy information for work and for writing projects.  I'm good at some kinds of trivia.  I recognize faces and voices (though if they are out of context, it's often very hard to place them).   I also have a fairly impressive ability to take in and process an enormous amount of information and detail in a very short time frame.  I'm a fast reader.  I can process visual information like a boss.  I get concepts.  I have a decent intuition. I'm quick at a lot of things.

I just don't retain long-term.

If I'm not using information on a daily basis, it is very likely to not stay in my head.  For example, I rarely need to mail things for work.  Maybe once a semester.  But whenever I do have to mail something, I have to ask our administrative assistant the procedure for doing it, because I've forgotten.  The process is frighteningly simple, but when I try to reach into the recesses of my brain and remember how to do it, I can't.  It freaks me out that I have lost the ability to do such a goofy thing.  It is so embarrassing.  I can laugh it off as Nutty Professor stuff, but it's something more, too.

I wish it was just how to send letters that was at stake.  This is where the shame and sadness come in.  Because I also lose whole chunks of friendships.  Romantic relationships.  Family experiences.  I remember impressions and feelings, writ large:  junior high=painful; high school=exhilarating; grad school=total confusion; delivering babies=awe; raising small children=boring.  And so on.  But the details are often just gone.  Another negative side effect, I think, is that it becomes easy to forget WHAT A BIG FANTASTIC FUCKING LIFE I'VE GOT TO LEAD.  I mean, really.  It's been amazing.  So what kind of jerk am I to forget?

Deep down, I worry that I'm missing these pieces of my life because I am narcissistic, and my narcissism prevents me from retaining details that aren't useful to my ego.  But that explanation doesn't feel like the truth, or not the whole truth, anyway.  Having these memory gaps is so excruciating because the people in my life are so important to me, and when I can't remember something that was important to them, or a connection we may have had, or even some way that I've hurt them, it's terrifying and sad.

I've also wondered if maybe I'm so future-focused that I don't fully take in the present moment?  Do I set too many goals?  Am I always just looking for the next big thing?

Maybe.  But I feel like I live my life deeply, and often very much in the moment.  I value friendship, and connection, and joy.

Nor do I think there is some childhood trauma that I can't recall that is making me lose these other parts of my life.  My growing up wasn't perfect.  Sometimes when I think really hard about those years, and try to put the story together, it doesn't make sense.  I wonder if I inherited a tendency to leave out the unpleasant parts, and family dynamics enabled that, probably.  But I don't think there's some unrecovered memory holding me back, either.

I guess I wonder if these things are lost because I have let them be lost.  I don't go back through old pictures; I don't tell old stories.  I have a canon of life events I remember, like everyone else, but maybe I have just rehearsed mine less.

That's probably why it has always been important to me to blog, here and elsewhere, and why I missed it a lot this last year, while I was finishing the other big writing projects I've been working on.  I used to print yearly books up of the blogging I did, and I'm so glad--the girls have been reading them, and telling me back the stories that I wrote about a life we lived but that I had already forgotten.  Maybe that's why I write.  Maybe that's why we're all drawn to record--to post our pictures, say something funny on Facebook, whatever.  To prove we were here, and are connected, and haven't forgotten.

*I had even forgotten the term "memory holes" was from Orwell's 1984.  Oy.