Diary - 2023, March 13

My memories

How do people remember? Does my memory work very differently from other people?

It seems to be an issue with some. They don’t seem to value my memories the way I do. They find me vague. It seems to cause friction.

How do people remember?

I do not have memories of events. I do not remember that a certain day I did something specific, and then something else happened.

I only have three memories that are contiguous and almost complete. The day I was given away. The day I was “taken in”. And the day I was locked away.

Those are the only events that my mind was able to piece together from the myriad of fragments floating in the darkness that fills my consciousness. After this my boys made the conscious decision that they don’t want to assemble fragments and remember.

Those are the only memories that contain the story, the dialogues, the sounds, the weather, the faces of the people, the environment, my feelings, their feelings, the jingle of the coins, the tones of the voices, the tension in the air … But there are no images.

My memories, my dreams, my meditations contain no imagery. I can imagine being in a forest, by the waterfall, but I cannot see it in my mind’s eye. Emotions dominate my memories and dreams, rather than pictures.

When I see, I see feelings. When I see a person’s hate for me in their eyes, I can also feel it in my heart.

So, those looks and facial expressions, the inflection of a hateful voice, and the feeling of hate are all tightly wrapped in a single moment, in a fraction of a memory. The same fragments repeated many times in many comparable experiences.

And when I recall being hated, it may be vague to the listener, but it is very specific to me. It is a feeling that fills my mind, my heart, and all my being. That is part of who I am. To be hated was the purpose of my childhood. Everything in those years was an expression of those people’s hatred for me.

Similarly, when I talk about being hungry, I don’t know specifics. I cannot recount a time when something happened, and I felt hungry. I know the feeling of being hungry. Of being denied food. Why would someone feed a child like that? What has the child done to earn his food? I remember the pain punching through a little child’s stomach accompanied by a sense of not being worthy. But I don’t remember, or even know why, how often, or other details.

When I mention being locked away, I don’t remember the specifics. I just remember a little boy forced to sit on a chair, without moving, for hours, and days. I remember that same boy picking himself up from the floor after having seizures. and I remember adults looking down in disapproval. Those occasions when he was free to look out of the window, he would plan his own demise by calculating the trajectory so that if he jumped out he would hit the spikes on a gate down below. I don’t remember the details of what happened when, I remember the pervading and tortuous feelings.

Each of those “moments” can just wrap around me a consume me for hours and days each time they resurface. Those instants are whole states of being that transcend the temporaneous nature of a single memory. They are not pieces of one or even many stories. They were a way of life.

And that is probably why my memories are so fragmented. That is all I can handle. That is all WE can handle.

So, when I am asked to share anecdotes, I do. In my own way. I can share Instants. I cannot share stories. Not because I don’t want to share. But because we don’t want to remember. Moments are difficult enough to manage.

I just don’t know how to explain it to people. Is that not enough? What kind of “juicy” details do they want and expect?