WHAT I CHOOSE TO REMEMBER

 

 

I cannot remember anything. I am eternally doomed to a life of immediately forgetting the names of new faces only moments after meeting them. Just yesterday, as I sat snuggled on the couch in my pink fuzzy blanket, I tried to remember the homework I was supposed to do for the week, and came up with nothing. Somewhat ironically, I also happen to be the most nostalgic person that I know - I essentially live on memory lane. Pair this with my mostly-challenged memory and you’ve got a dangerous combination of wanting to remember and being partially incapable of doing just that. This is why I absolutely have to write. I write to remind myself of things I would otherwise forget and to ensure that others will long reminisce on the pieces that I chose to share in my lifetime, whether they are fiction or first-person accounts of actual events. I write because no one and nothing deserves to be forgotten.

 

Scanning my bedroom, it is obvious that I need countless reminders to simply function on a daily basis. Next to my vanity hangs an eight-photo frame, seven of them representing the days of the week and the eighth for additional reminders, where I write the week’s events to keep in mind as I prepare for each day. Next to this on my desk lies a pink and orange-lined notepad where I have a current list of bills that I’ve paid beside a list of things I need to pick up on my next Kroger trip. Hanging on my door is a pink dry-erase board for last-minute reminders as I head to class. These physical reminders, in addition to the countless notes on my phone and computer and detailed notes in my planner, are the only reason I have ever turned in a paper on time, remembered to wish my friend a happy birthday, and even showed up for an exam. If I didn’t write these items down, I would be an unorganized mess of a human being. My mother learned this the difficult way when she sent me on my way to buy Thanksgiving groceries without giving me a list, and I returned home without half of the dinner essentials.

 

On that same note, I write not simply to remember the tasks I must complete, but also to preserve the memories I have made, both favorable and unpleasant. Nothing makes me more sentimental than looking back on old diary or journal entries, recalling the way I was feeling on any given day on my past. This has always been true for me, as evidenced by the countless childhood diaries I have uncovered in recent years. I would spend pages gushing about my crush asking to borrow my eraser, or documenting my family’s trip to the pumpkin patch and the arguments I would inevitably lose with my older brothers. Entire days I would have forgotten if it weren’t for my personal narratives scrawled in barely-legible print, featuring atrocious spelling and sensationalized descriptions. Perhaps others would consider these occasions insignificant, but for me, I couldn’t be more thankful for my need to document all the happenings of my adolescent world. If it were possible, I would remember everything.

 

Perhaps one of the most quizzical aspects of my memory is my uncanny ability to remember dances. Every week at practice, I show up with last week’s material completely cemented in my brain. I constantly get comments from teammates about how I always seem to remember the steps, and it’s not even just the recent dances that I can whip out on a moment’s notice, I can also bring back old dances: back to my first ever recital in 2003. The scariest part is that I can do some of these dances in their entirety without skipping a beat. When I take a step back and look at the situation, I find it rather odd that the things I claim to want to remember - stories, moments, events - are the things I have to write down to recall. At the same time, the things I really should not waste space in my brain for - dances from age 9 - are still up there, floating around and waiting for the recital song to come on and trigger the movement. I don’t need to write down the steps of a dance, because I just remember them. I want to remember them.

 

I think this speaks so much to how our brain functions. To avoid treating this as a research essay for psychology class, I just want to touch on Freud briefly. Part of his psychoanalytic theory was that we don’t “forget” anything by accident, we forget things for a reason that our conscious mind is unaware of. On a small scale, this seems so ridiculous: I forgot the Thanksgiving food at the grocery store because I didn’t want to eat it? That’s absurd. On a larger scale, and given this example, I think he may be onto something. On some level, I have always retained dances much better than I have anything else. Whatever math lesson we would learn one day would be long gone by the next class, I have always missed my dentist appointments. If I investigate this issue from Freud’s perspective, it’s clear that I forgot those things because I don’t love to remember them. Rightfully so, nobody loves the dentist (and if I ever meet someone who does, I will challenge fundamentally who they are as a being). Ostensibly, I seem to be someone who longs to remember everything, and yet the only thing I ever succeed in recalling are dance steps.

 

The things that a person remember say a lot about that individual, because you are taking the opportunity to save that snap shot in your brain and retain that information. Outside of exams for school, no one is forcing you to memorize anything. Every individual has that power to make that choice, whether we realize we are doing it or not. I have spent hours recollecting memories in a journal, or taking photos, or staring at someone to memorize everything about them, and yet remembering dances requires no extra effort. The things we love come back to us so easily, and I find that incredible and strangely unnerving. This simple idea has a way of revealing to you where your values truly are. When I thought the memories I most longed to preserve were those with my family or friends, and yet the ones that effortlessly remain are dance routines, it shows me that those are the items that matter to me. In writing, and learning what it was that I didn’t have to write down to remember, I have gained so much knowledge about myself that I never would have discovered previously. Writing has a way of unlocking parts of you that you didn’t know existed, if it’s not your actual writing that does the decoding. This is why I write: because it tells me about myself.