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story of my life
Jan. 16th, 2008 11:53 pmRambly; also: navel-gaze-y. Be warned.
It sometimes seems to me that I have a better memory than many of the people I interact with day-to-day. I'm not talking about a better memory for things like to-do lists, or details of what I'm working on, or paying the bills on time or practicalities like that. I'm also not basing this on observation -- as I'm notoriously absentminded about things like 'remembering to take my cell phone with me' -- but on other peoples' reports of their long-term memory. Because that's what I'm talking about: long-term 'historical' memory, being able to remember scattered incidents back to when I was three years old, being able to recall things that happened to me from about age five in reasonably good chronological order with a fair amount of detail. (Full-sensory, too. I remember the color of the wood of the Heidelburg Tun -- and I wasn't far off, either; I just checked the picture on the Wikipedia article -- the smell of my aunt's garden, the taste of blood when I fell off the parallel bars and split my lip open at age nine, and the way the torn lip felt against my tongue.)
A lot of my friends say that they can't remember back that far, or that they don't remember things in order, or in very great detail, or don't remember things at all unless someone or something reminds them. (And I don't doubt them a bit; how could I possibly, with something like memory?) There could be a lot of explanations for that, but sometimes I wonder if this is part of it:
A lot of my friends are scientists, or engineers. I'm a writer, a word-person; more to the point, I've told myself stories since... well, since I can remember, which is to say back to when I was three. And not all of those stories were wholly invented. I've narrated my own life for as long as I could remember, retreading details and recasting it in my own mind -- not just reliving it, but trying to turn it over and fit it into the larger narrative of my life. That time I fell off the parallel bars? It got replayed, not only because it hurt (ow), but also because it fit several of the narratives I told myself about my life: I tried to do the flip that resulted in the fall to fit in with a group of popular girls, and so it became part of my narrative, much later, of fitting in (or not); I failed, which fit, later, into a narrative about being clumsy and unathletic. I'm not saying that falling-off-the-parallel-bars was a pivotal moment in my life -- far from it. But when I tried to make sense of my life, when I told myself stories about Not Being Popular or Being Clumsy or whatever, I'd retread it, turn it around, remember it. And keep remembering it. Over and over and over and over and... To this day.
(Sometimes even in nested memories! I have a particular memory from first grade that I remember, and remember remembering, and remember remembering remembering, chained upward until... well, now. And I've often narrated my own movements, sometimes even from third-person -- that sounds bizarre, but it's true -- so sometimes I'll remember the words I used to describe my own walk home from school, remembering the picture I was making inside my head that afternoon when I was twelve. And lodestone memories: the time, in second grade, a friend asked me how I could know that I was awake and not dreaming, and I said of course that I couldn't, and wondered if it was a dream... and then returned to that memory every few years and thought: what if I woke up now, and it was a dream? What if I really am still six years old, dreaming a world and a life, and tomorrow I'll wake up and walk with Eileen across that frosty playground -- and envy her waist-length fat french braid, and exhale hard to make my breath show up on the cold air -- and tell her: last night I had this dream.... So I come back to it, because I wonder, because wouldn't that be a story?)
I wonder if this tendency to narrativize (not a word, I know!) my life is part of why I remember it so well -- because I've been practicing remembering, keeping things in working memory for a long time, until the habit of recalling them was easy. And of course this has a down side. Whenever I'm in a particular kind of bad mood and start to tell myself the Story of Why I'm An Idiot, my brain is quite happy to bring up thousands of examples in full living color, going back, literally, to when I was three years old. Furthermore, given that I've been recasting these stories repeatedly to myself for, in some cases, twenty-two years, chances are nearly 100% that I have altered many of the details or even made incidents up whole-cloth. Still. Some of the memories are true, or at least true enough to be corroborated; for many of the rest, I don't think it really matters how close I am to the truth. In general, I'm glad to remember that I played Peter Rabbit's mother in the first grade puppet show, or that there was mother-of-pearl buried among the roots of the plum trees in our backyard when I was nine, or the color of that Tun, even if I might be embellishing them -- but I do wonder if that's why I remember them: because I made them a story, and made them less true, but more memorable.
(Of course, now you're all going to tell me you narrativized your own lives and also have rotten memories, and ruin my theory -- nonetheless! I do think it's why I remember, at least.)
It sometimes seems to me that I have a better memory than many of the people I interact with day-to-day. I'm not talking about a better memory for things like to-do lists, or details of what I'm working on, or paying the bills on time or practicalities like that. I'm also not basing this on observation -- as I'm notoriously absentminded about things like 'remembering to take my cell phone with me' -- but on other peoples' reports of their long-term memory. Because that's what I'm talking about: long-term 'historical' memory, being able to remember scattered incidents back to when I was three years old, being able to recall things that happened to me from about age five in reasonably good chronological order with a fair amount of detail. (Full-sensory, too. I remember the color of the wood of the Heidelburg Tun -- and I wasn't far off, either; I just checked the picture on the Wikipedia article -- the smell of my aunt's garden, the taste of blood when I fell off the parallel bars and split my lip open at age nine, and the way the torn lip felt against my tongue.)
A lot of my friends say that they can't remember back that far, or that they don't remember things in order, or in very great detail, or don't remember things at all unless someone or something reminds them. (And I don't doubt them a bit; how could I possibly, with something like memory?) There could be a lot of explanations for that, but sometimes I wonder if this is part of it:
A lot of my friends are scientists, or engineers. I'm a writer, a word-person; more to the point, I've told myself stories since... well, since I can remember, which is to say back to when I was three. And not all of those stories were wholly invented. I've narrated my own life for as long as I could remember, retreading details and recasting it in my own mind -- not just reliving it, but trying to turn it over and fit it into the larger narrative of my life. That time I fell off the parallel bars? It got replayed, not only because it hurt (ow), but also because it fit several of the narratives I told myself about my life: I tried to do the flip that resulted in the fall to fit in with a group of popular girls, and so it became part of my narrative, much later, of fitting in (or not); I failed, which fit, later, into a narrative about being clumsy and unathletic. I'm not saying that falling-off-the-parallel-bars was a pivotal moment in my life -- far from it. But when I tried to make sense of my life, when I told myself stories about Not Being Popular or Being Clumsy or whatever, I'd retread it, turn it around, remember it. And keep remembering it. Over and over and over and over and... To this day.
(Sometimes even in nested memories! I have a particular memory from first grade that I remember, and remember remembering, and remember remembering remembering, chained upward until... well, now. And I've often narrated my own movements, sometimes even from third-person -- that sounds bizarre, but it's true -- so sometimes I'll remember the words I used to describe my own walk home from school, remembering the picture I was making inside my head that afternoon when I was twelve. And lodestone memories: the time, in second grade, a friend asked me how I could know that I was awake and not dreaming, and I said of course that I couldn't, and wondered if it was a dream... and then returned to that memory every few years and thought: what if I woke up now, and it was a dream? What if I really am still six years old, dreaming a world and a life, and tomorrow I'll wake up and walk with Eileen across that frosty playground -- and envy her waist-length fat french braid, and exhale hard to make my breath show up on the cold air -- and tell her: last night I had this dream.... So I come back to it, because I wonder, because wouldn't that be a story?)
I wonder if this tendency to narrativize (not a word, I know!) my life is part of why I remember it so well -- because I've been practicing remembering, keeping things in working memory for a long time, until the habit of recalling them was easy. And of course this has a down side. Whenever I'm in a particular kind of bad mood and start to tell myself the Story of Why I'm An Idiot, my brain is quite happy to bring up thousands of examples in full living color, going back, literally, to when I was three years old. Furthermore, given that I've been recasting these stories repeatedly to myself for, in some cases, twenty-two years, chances are nearly 100% that I have altered many of the details or even made incidents up whole-cloth. Still. Some of the memories are true, or at least true enough to be corroborated; for many of the rest, I don't think it really matters how close I am to the truth. In general, I'm glad to remember that I played Peter Rabbit's mother in the first grade puppet show, or that there was mother-of-pearl buried among the roots of the plum trees in our backyard when I was nine, or the color of that Tun, even if I might be embellishing them -- but I do wonder if that's why I remember them: because I made them a story, and made them less true, but more memorable.
(Of course, now you're all going to tell me you narrativized your own lives and also have rotten memories, and ruin my theory -- nonetheless! I do think it's why I remember, at least.)
