Memory Is a Double-Edged Sword
Losing it still felt like cutting out my heart
CW: descriptions of C-PTSD symptoms
There is a certain conscious irony to the existence of Nine Lives — to the fact that I am writing essays that are at least half-memoir only now that my autobiographical memory has substantially deserted me.
From the beginning, I was blessed — and cursed — with an excellent episodic memory. Not to the level of hyperthymesia, but observably better than anyone else I knew well enough to compare recollections with. I had many more memories of early childhood than most people, and I could often recite chunks of conversation verbatim months after they occurred … or years or decades later, if the context was emotionally significant.
Conversely, my working memory was barely adequate. I could hold about five different things in mind at a time — enough that I didn’t have to write a grocery list to pick up just a handful of items, but not so much that I could keep a job waiting tables. Inevitably, I’d be racing around trying to remember to check if the order was up for one table, punch in the order I already had, refill water at that second table, take orders for a third table, bring bread or chips when I did so … and someone would stop me and ask for a slice of lemon and every single thing except the lemon would fall out of my head on the spot. Poof.
That’s what it was like for me in 2018, except instead of being able to hold five or six things in mind before it all fell apart, I could hold … one. I would leave the house intending to group three errands together, and I would finish the first one and sit there in the car with absolutely zero idea what else I was supposed to be doing. Nor would it come back to me in any sort of useful time frame. In the space of a few months, I went from being able to remember five things I needed from the grocery store, to not even being able to remember whether I was going to the grocery store.
This was cause for some concern, simply because I wasn’t certain of the etiology or how far the deterioration would progress. I read as much as I could about memory decline, especially as related to menopause, but there wasn’t enough detail to draw any clear conclusions. I took steps to rule out things like medication side effects and vitamin deficiency; the remaining suspects were a) perimenopausal ‘brain fog’, in which case I might hope to regain some of my facility after my hormones settled, or b) some form of early dementia, in which case this was as good as it would ever be again, and possibly marked the beginning of the end of my useful life. NO BIG DEAL.
But worries about the future aside, the day-to-day effect of my lack of working memory was fairly mild. I learned to live by lists, which meant a certain logistical overhead, and my failure rate at various tasks was marginally higher, but that was an annoyance and an inconvenience, not an existential crisis.
Losing my autobiographical memory — that was an existential crisis.
I don’t know whether the decline in my episodic memory started later than that of my working memory, or whether I was just slower to notice — I suspect the latter, because how often, in your daily life, do you reach back for detailed memories from decades earlier? I feel like by my late forties I often went weeks at a time without any reason to think about my life before age thirty. (The fact that at forty-three I’d jettisoned nearly all of my possessions and moved to an entirely different country also eliminated most environmental reminders of anything that came before.)
Eventually, though, I started to figure out that my entire tapestry of personal history was being eaten by moths. Discovering this was, and still is, a surreal experience — like an astronomer determining the mass of a planet they cannot see by measuring its effect on the stars they can see. I didn’t know what I was missing precisely because it was missing.
Facebook provided one of the early clues. When I joined Facebook in 2007, I took the ‘friends’ label perhaps a little more literally than most people.[1] I had very strict rules for myself about who I would connect with: only either people I had met in person, or people I had known in another context online for multiple years.
I maintained that policy, with few exceptions, right through 2019. The exceptions were mostly people in the broader speculative fiction writing community, so that even if I’d never met them in person, I knew something about them, and we had loads of friends and acquaintances in common. I never added anyone I didn’t personally know unless we had a common community.
Which is why I was completely thrown the first time I saw the name of someone I was ‘friends’ with on Facebook and I had absolutely no idea who that person was.
Names, especially last names, do not tend to reside on the tip of my tongue. But not recognizing a formerly significant name was simply not a thing that happened to me. My concept of a person, various facts about them, and my memories of the ways and times we’d interacted — those were easily accessible, and would attach to the name as soon as I saw or heard it.
So then I pulled up my total Facebook friends list of some 350 people. Found several more I couldn’t place at all. And worse, tens upon tens of people about whom I had only the vaguest of impressions, like “I have the sense we interacted online at some point in the 1990s? Maybe?” No details, no actual memory of anything specific, just the barest sense that I had, at some point in the past, known more.
Well, fuck me.
I’ve since determined, in that ‘discover a planet by measuring the star’s wobble’ kind of way, that I have giant moth holes stretching throughout my adulthood, and my childhood … my childhood is mostly hole, barely any cloth left to it at all. What I do retain of my first seventeen years is almost entirely semantic, rather than episodic, knowledge: I have a series of facts (this event occurred in this way, at this time, with these consequences) but no sense of presence in that past.
It’s like the difference between a gravestone and a rubbing of that gravestone: both contain information, but only one has weight and solidity and texture.
And although older memories are more likely to be missing, the phenomenon is not confined to the distant past. Here’s one example I found particularly disturbing: one day in late September or early October of 2022, I suddenly recalled out of the blue that months before, my elder stepdaughter had talked about the possibility of visiting us with her fiancé over the winter holidays. And I’d forgotten all about it.
So I went immediately to Jak, who talks to his daughter more often than I do. “What ever happened with Michaela and Ian coming for Christmas? Did they decide whether they wanted to do that?”
He blinked at me for a moment, then said, “That … was last year.” As in, 2021.
“No, what? It couldn’t have been.”
He turned to his computer, willing I suppose to give me the benefit of the doubt. (He, too, remembers when my memory was far more reliable than anyone else’s.) “I’ll look back to see if she said something I forgot, but I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of last year. Remember they came here, and then they went to Mexico City, and I got them that trip to the monarch sanctuary?”
Well, shit. Once he said that, I did recall that Michaela and Ian went to see the butterflies. In early 2022.
Which meant I hadn’t just misremembered what year we’d talked about a potential visit, I’d forgotten their entire visit. I have a number of memories from when they came together the first time, in 2016 — impossible to mistake, because that was the year of agony and nonfunctional arms, in the apartment before our current house. From 2021, I have nothing.
Only once before have I felt the ground fall out from beneath me in a similar way.
In my mid-twenties, I experienced dissociative amnesia for the first and only time in my life: I was fully aware of the details of a particular traumatic interaction for a day and a half, and then on the second morning afterward the entire memory was just … gone. I retained some semantic knowledge — I knew who I had been talking with, and the broad context around the conversation, and that extreme emotional pain had been the result. But the actual dialogue — which the day before I could have recited almost word for word — was suddenly a black hole. To this day I have no idea what this person said to me that was so awful my brain just noped right out.
This was an extremely disconcerting event for someone who was used to remembering absolutely everything of consequence, and a lot else besides. Despite being traumatized almost daily from birth to age seventeen, my brain never turned to dissociative amnesia as a coping mechanism in my childhood. On the contrary, I remembered countless thousands of instances of abuse, in great detail, with full sensory and emotional engagement.
That’s the curse part, you see. I remembered it so well it never went away.
My childhood experiences left me with a baseline of post-traumatic agony — a sort of emotional chronic pain condition that occasionally flared up into acute, intrusive flashbacks in which I would re-experience some aspect of the abuse. I also suffered constant, relentless nightmares. Nearly every night of my life, I had a starring role in at least one feature horror film; sometimes two or three.
Interestingly, the physical component of my actual abuse almost never played any part in my dreams. Roughly half of my nightmares would be fairly realistic ones involving people (and pets) from my current or past life, including my parents — albeit in altered or entirely new situations. In those cases, the horror tended to be psychological.
The other half were insane gorefests of creepy body horror. I don’t ever watch horror movies, having no desire to give my subconscious any more ideas. Unfortunately, my brain has shown it can generate unlimited gruesomeness without external inspiration.
With a lot of very deliberate psychological work (and doubtless aided by the passage of time and the formation of other, better memories and relationships), I eventually learned how to anticipate and control the intrusive flashbacks; my last fully dissociative event occurred sometime in my late thirties, and by my early forties I was no longer being triggered at all.
But I was only able to work on the symptoms that occurred while I was awake and conscious. The nightmares remained completely beyond my control, and the passage of decades barely reduced their frequency. In order to function properly each day, I first had to shake off the intense emotional state the previous night had engendered: terror, shame, panic, humiliation, rage, grief. Sometimes this took hours. Sometimes the residual horror was so bad even a full day later that I would stay awake as long as possible so I wouldn’t have to go … wherever my mind would take me.
It was a rare day when I woke up without that handicap — perhaps six or eight times a year, always a cause for relieved surprise.
And then … the ratio flipped.
Waking up from a negative dream of any sort became the exception, not the rule. I have gruesome nightmares maybe … once or twice a year, now? And the more realistic sort maybe another … four or five? Some incredibly tiny percentage, anyway.
This inversion didn’t happen overnight, but it happened fast: my nightmare ratio dropped by ninety-six percent over a span of roughly two years, right at the end of my forties.
Just as the obviously perimenopausal symptoms like hot flashes were peaking, at approximately the same time that I was losing my autobiographical memory.
I cannot imagine that is a coincidence. It seems much more likely to be two results of the same basic change to my brain, or perhaps even cause and effect. Maybe the clarity and immediacy of my traumatic memories had been preventing my brain from generating non-horrific dreams this entire time.
I didn’t have a choice about this development. In fact, if someone had come to me and offered to cure my night terrors, but — like a witch in a fairy tale — with my memory as the price, I would have unequivocally declined. The experiences of my childhood were collectively horrific, but they were mine. I survived them; I earned those scars.
I mean, what are we, as individuals, if not the sum of our thoughts and memories? And if you erase most of those memories, who is left?
Can I even reasonably consider myself the same person, now?
Over the last few years, I have experienced a variety of other fun[2] menopausal symptoms, both temporary and (apparently) permanent, most of which came as a complete surprise. I had been led to expect hot flashes, not that I would literally lose my mind. Even once I began to explicitly look for information, most of what I found was too vague to be of help.
Early last year, I finally passed from perimenopause into full menopause. Somewhere along the way, I seem to have gained back some of my working memory — although my capacity is a lot less consistent than it used to be, I am rarely limited to remembering just one thing at a time.
My autobiographical memory has not similarly rebounded. What’s gone appears to be permanently gone, and — as the monarch story shows — new, post-menopausal memories are not immune. My memory-moths seem to select their threads at random; things that you’d think would be highly memorable (like the one and only time[3] we’ve had visitors since the pandemic sent us into semipermanent lockdown) seem no less likely to get munched.
I’ve had a couple of years now to sit with this new reality, and … well, I can at least say that my distress is less intense than it used to be. I have come to appreciate being able to go about my life most mornings without first climbing out of an emotional abyss. I’ve mostly stopped grieving the loss of the person I used to be. But I’m also afraid of people figuring out that I barely remember them and being offended. And I’m still terrified of losing even more of my memory.
Nine Lives is my candle against that personal darkness, a way to set down some of what I do still know against some future time when I might not know it anymore. And it’s a candle too against a cultural darkness, shining a tiny light on topics — like menopause — we don’t talk about nearly enough.
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