If You Can’t Convince Them, Confuse Them

Dearest Orchid,

Everything fades, given enough time. The good stuff, which you’ll hate losing — birthday celebrations with cake and laughter, joyful nights around a campfire with friends, moments of peace. The bad stuff, bittersweet to forget — funerals, losses of relationships, moments of turmoil and anxiety. The mid stuff, which is most stuff.

Details, Details

I love snippets of recollection, the ones that are hard to relay because the context is the tapestry of you, a detail in a saga that’s irrelevant to anyone who isn’t you. My fragments: reading the same trilogy every year when we visited Door County in the summertime (The Black Jewels series by Anne Bishop, which has since grown way past a trilogy). Going to Lake Michigan by myself every chance I got, in all types of weather, when I first came to Northwestern and after. Forming surprising and even lasting bonds online, at the height of AIM Instant Messenger and Xanga.

I am a consummate packrat of details and information. Recently, my first Gmail account ever warned me that it was almost at capacity (free 15 GB, only took 15 years to max you out). I deeply struggled with eliminating the record of years past, printing to PDF some of the exchanges while deleting the actual emails, laden with hefty song attachments. I downloaded each song, just in case, even though I didn’t do that when those emails first landed in my inbox.

So, it was a shock when I began to notice that many of the specifics I thought my mind would trap forever had begun to trickle away. Concerns that kept me up at night as a teen? Faded. Despair over the first heartbreak? Distant. Lyric snippets from random songs found on CDs I picked up from the library because I liked the cover art? Intact. Thanks, brain.

Memory’s A Wily One

How I think of memory: we remember the things we care about that are immediately relevant at a given time. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, relationships were central in my life. I gave too much weight to most connections and could therefore recall the most mind-numbing minutiae. Those details are mostly gone now. There are instances, when I grasp a sliver of a memory, but it’s lost its contextual anchor. Like the punch line to a joke, but the setup has fled. I only retain the lessons I learned from those experiences, with impressions of the accompanying emotions added for a bit of flavor.

I listen to many audiobooks (majority fiction), and without seeing the written words, details slip away. Sometimes, I can’t recall how books end, what that last page, or rather last minute of audio, depicts. Secondary character names become elusive, unique quirks melt into one another. That’s why I am an excellent candidate for re-listening, rereading, and rewatching. While some bits of media stay with me in bright clarity, other parts just don’t stand out.

I used to define myself by how well I remembered things. As this ability devolves, I have to reevaluate, figure out what’s actually important about recalling “everything.” Perhaps it’s the historian in me, wanting to maintain a pristine record.

TL,DR: Eyewitness Testimony Not So Reliable

Reader, this is a false narrative. Memory is subjective. The first time you access a memory will be your most accurate recollection of that event. Every subsequent time you recall that moment, you will actually be remembering your most recent recollection and not the original event. And the source material gets distorted just a smidge. Those beloved reminiscences from years ago that you hold dear are probably nowhere near what actually happened; what really occurred is lost.

I also think pandemic fucked up my memory. I used to be sharper, better at recollecting the tiniest bits of information. I made connections easily and speedily. And now? I’m slower, and the puzzle pieces don’t fit as well. Hey there, stressed brain, I see you’ve been affected by two years of shitshow.

Worrying about or fearing this change won’t halt it. I can’t go back to how it was. So I've made a grudging peace with my memory — shit is gonna get lost. The only solution is straightforward, but effortful. More pictures, more recordings, more communication via the written medium. Social media can be a wonderful record-keeper, if you feel like sharing with the class. If not, then journal.

Acceptance. That’s the relationship I strive for with my memory.

Love,

Aster

P.S. Let’s chat about life lessons learned. Tell me about something you learned easily. Then tell me about something you learned the hard way. And then tell me about something you’re still workin’ on learning. Why do you think some lessons take longer to assimilate? What helps with and what detracts from converting life experiences to life guidelines?

Personally, the interpersonal lessons are the hardest, while the ones that involve only me land easier. Then again, maybe that’s not true — I still try to breathe and swallow water simultaneously, and biology keeps trying to teach me that won’t work.

[Currently listening to: Deep Dish by Ani DiFranco, which is one of those aforementioned random songs off an arbitrary library CD with strange cover art, featuring apparently memorable lyrics.]