The Things I Don’t Remember: On Memory Loss
When I think about my brain and how it was affected during my depression, I picture it as a room full of doors. Some wide open, others just a crack, some you have to jiggle the handle for them to give. However, in this space many other doors are locked and leave me searching for a skeleton key I lost a long time ago.
How do you write about memory loss effectively? I mean, if you can’t remember the events that you lived through, how do you talk about them in a meaningful way? Due to my fifteen-plus years of deep depression, there are large swaths of my life that remain unaccounted for. Often, a friend or a family member will recount a story that I participated in, and I will have to confess that I have no memory of it. Or I remember blurry flashes of it, like when you wake up from a dream and feel it slipping away even as you try to hold onto it.
After thinking about how I would write this essay, I realized that the things I do remember serve as touchstones amid the fog. The way to write about memory loss, then, is to work with what I do remember, so as to define the gaps in between.
The Inciting Incident
I vaguely remember the first time I realized something was wrong with my brain. I was reminiscing about my high school days, a fact I find odd because I try not to remember those times. We…
