lb_lee | Memory Work Essays, Chunk 10: Memory Distortion, If It Didn't Happen, and Conclusion

This is another chunk of our memory work essays, posted as promotion for the AllFam Kickstarter. We're in the final week, guys! And we passed $3000! :D This is so exciting! I guess we'll see what the next few days hold! For that time, every $300 raised will get another 1000 words posted. Thanks so much for all y'all's support, guys! Also, reposting the prior paragraph from the last chunk just for continuity since the wordcount break hit a weird place. This is the final chunk of the second essay, Memory Work Proper, and after this, it'll be the final essay, "Memory Work Personally"!

Previous Chunks: see index!

In the heat of the moment, you might believe things that now you’re not so certain about. (This is especially true for us if memories come up when we’re groggy or asleep.) You might find yourself thinking, "no, no, I really don’t think that’s true. It just doesn’t feel right." This does happen! Memories get distorted and confused! Here are some ways they can happen:

Time dilation or compression. Intense experiences can seem to last forever, or be over in a flash.
Size confusion. Our attackers tend to loom huge in our memory, especially when we were very small ourself.
Squishing similar events together. We spent thousands of days at school, but we remember that one time the classroom flooded with sewage way clearer than any given ordinary day. The normal days just all blur together. So do nigh-identical traumas.
Person confusion. We’re always very reluctant to say who someone is in a memory until we’re absolutely sure, because often our brain gives up that information late. Instead, it just leaves person shaped shadows, placeholders, and sometimes these placeholders are the wrong shape and size for who they eventually prove to be. Memories that come up through nightmares often use substitutes—random strangers, or different people we knew, for whom such behavior seems improbable.
Headspace confused with corporeal. Injuries we incur in headspace still hurt, and sometimes we feel the ghosts of those sensations completely independently of the memory they’re attached to. There are some things in memories that we aren’t sure if they were headspace phenomena or visual hallucinations; we just know they couldn’t have physically existed.
Symbolic confused with literal. See above.
Suggestion. Sometimes, we remember something not because it happened, but because we expected it to have happened, or because someone we trust tells us it happened. (Lynn Wasniak writes about her own experiences with high suggestibility leading to hallucinations and memory distortions in the “Facing Down Distortion” article on pages 2-3 of the August 1992 issue of the Many Voices newsletter.)

Maybe some people are able to remember everything without distortion. We are not one of them. At first, this caused us a lot of consternation, but then we realized that our expectations were unreasonable. These memories were all years, or even decades old. They’d been broken into pieces and scattered all over the place. Did we really expect we could just put them back together like a puzzle fresh out of the box? We had to dial back our expectations, and let go of our hopes for a strict “this is true, this is false” binary. Some memories we feel sure about, some less so; others are just too fragmentary or incoherent to make much sense of or come to any strong conclusion about. Sometimes, that’s just the way it goes.

One thing that has given us comfort, at least, is that whether we believed them or not, whatever our healthcare status was, the memories have continued like a steamroller. Eventually, we just had to accept that whatever their veracity, the memories were here and we had to deal with them regardless.

But What If It Didn’t Happen?

We’ve spoken to people, singlet and plural alike, who have memories of things they know did not or could not have corporeally happened. Sometimes they see it as the frame of “another life,” or it’s a headspace event (for example, we’ve had headmates who died without the communal vessel being involved; those deaths were still traumatic, and still needed to be dealt with). These are things that can cause intense anxiety: how to deal with them? Should folks deal with them?

At its most basic, what matters most is: does dealing with these memories make things better, or worse? And I don’t mean short-term highs and lows that befall everybody sometimes, or are just an innate part of the memory cycle. Over the long term, are triggers breaking down? Are you able to overcome things that you couldn’t before? Is your life becoming more manageable and sustainable? Are you and your headmates feeling better over time, on the whole? If those questions are too abstract, try using your psychological badness scale and plotting your distress numbers on a calendar. As the years pass, are those numbers improving or getting worse?

Memory work is useless if it’s not making things better, and that’s true regardless of whether the memories are. If you find yourself getting hospitalized more and more, becoming increasingly dependent on a smaller number of people, or your distress numbers are long-term rising, then memory work is not the solution to whatever it is you’re dealing with. Something else needs to get taken care of, be it concurrent issues (a physical illness, an addiction, other mental stuff), life transitions (death, homelessness, children), or something else. The whole point of what you’re remembering is so you can heal and become stronger, not just gouge open all your old wounds and leave them to fester.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you’re going to have to come to your own conclusions about what’s real and what’s not. You’re going to have to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, and make your decisions accordingly. That’s painful and hard, and nobody can do it for you.

All things end, and that includes memories. It may not be now, or even years from now, but one day, you will be okay. It will not last forever.

Good luck.

--to be continued in the next essay!