Meditations on memory

 

Most people don’t retain many vivid memories of experiences they had as three-year-olds. Neither do I. However, I do have one—if you can describe it as one. It’s full of blotches and gaps like an ancient, damaged reel of film, but there are a few scattered images that stand out as being sharper than the rest. The first image is this: my sister, two of my brothers and I are wrestling in the living room. One of my brothers is on his knees with his back towards me. He seems like a giant. I say something I think is cool and defiant. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember being confident. I kick at him. He grabs my leg and twists it.

I have no memory of falling down, though I must have. The next image I have is of me lying on my back on one of the living room sofas, crying. My mom is examining my leg. As she tries to bend it, I remember being convulsed with a fresh torrent of wails. I have no memory of the severity of the pain, but I do remember the sound I made, the feeling of hot tears coursing down my cheeks and temples, and the sound of my screams and the way they resonated in my skull. Then there’s another missing frame. Then I’m being lifted out of our van in the hospital parking lot with my leg tied to a board. Then another gap. Then, I remember feeling sad because the nice nurse told me that she would have to cut off my favorite red and white checkered shorts to avoid jostling my leg. I remember the snip of the scissors and seeing my shorts come off in neat little squares.

And that was it. Those are my memories of the day my older brother broke my leg. To be exact, he fractured my femur. Because psychologists tell us that things that happen to us while we’re young play a disproportionate role in shaping who we become as adults, I have sometimes conjectured that it was a formative event in my life. However, it’s hard for me to imagine how the event they represent could have molded me, since I don’t have much of an emotional connection to these warped, flashbulb images. And yet, it was one of the more traumatic events in my relatively trauma-free childhood. Given how many of our traits seem to be influenced by events and forces that lurk below the level of conscious awareness, I have wondered, from time to time, what I would be like if it had never happened. Would I be less neurotic? More athletic? Happier? Taller? It’s very easy to pinpoint a couple of life events as scapegoats and heap all the blame for our troubles on them when in reality we are probably shaped by a constellation of millions of little moments, most of which we don’t even remember.

The fragmentary images of my early childhood accident that still cling to my synapses are so distorted and otherworldly—the first scene, for instance, appears in my mind’s eye as if through convex, dirty, yellowish-green lenses—that I wonder how much I would remember of the event if my family hadn’t talked about it so much after the fact. If there wasn’t such a clear narrative thread in my mind linking all of these images together, would they even seem to be part of the same event, or would they be a jumble of inexplicable, disconnected vignettes, like many of my other memories of early childhood?

Human beings are narrative builders. Narratives link events together in simple, causal chains that make it easy to remember information and make inferences about the future. However, I wonder whether the stories we tell about ourselves are no more than thin coats of paint we spray over a past that’s too chaotic to make any real sense of. Memories are fragile things. Each time we call one up, it changes slightly, like a delicate, ancient document being handled carelessly by someone with thick, greasy fingers. Whenever we recall an event, that event will be forever tinged by that specific act of recollection. How then can we trust our self-narratives?

Well, perhaps we shouldn’t. Although the idea of not having a firm concept of who you are may frighten some people, I find it very freeing. If you are open to the idea that your self-concept is subject to error, you are freer to try and build the kind of life you want, rather than one you think you are capable of having. Narratives are a data reduction technique, and as such, they mark events that don’t fit into them as outliers or irrelevant. In this way, they can blind us to our own potential and keep us from becoming the best possible versions of ourselves.

So, if you think you’re incapable of accomplishing something you dream of doing, examine the memories that lead you to this belief. I think you’ll find, with some interrogation of these memories and the narrative built around them, that you don’t know as much about yourself as you think. You may have been telling yourself stories your whole life that are untrue. Now to be clear, I’m not saying that any individual has limitless potential. We are all limited in one way or another, and some dreams are unattainable. However, because we may have an inaccurate or distorted view of ourselves, maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to write things off as impossible. So, take some risks! Life is too short to let your personal narratives and memories limit the things you’re willing to try.