please hold my memories for me

what it means to live when your brain doesn't want to remember

Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) refers to a lifelong inability to vividly recollect or re-experience personal past events from a first-person perspective.

What is life if not built upon memories? And what is existence if not an ammalgamation of all the things you’ve experienced? Some might even say that your presence in this world begins with your earliest memory and only will end once no new memories can be made.

And isn’t it one of human being’s greatest fears, being unable to recall life and losing memories? How else do we explain the compulsion to pull out our phones and capture every moment?

Memories are at the core of the human experience. One might even argue that memories are the way for life to gain its meaning. Then, isn’t it a tragedy to exist in this world without the capabilities of having them?

Recently, I have been subsumed by the process of reckoning with the fact that I am unable to fully understand the human experience. It is a hard thing to process. I have always felt that there is a responsibility in being born as a human being with consciousness, that responsibility being to fully embody the human experience, to live a life fully lived. But what does it mean to live a meaningful life when every memory is ever-fleeting, none of them ever truly in my grasp?

I fall into this tendency of explaining this condition as a beautiful thing because I desperately want it to be. I would say that ‘my brain only exists in the moment’. But, the reality is that the beauty of living in the moment exist in the fact that you can relive the moment afterwards. I would say that ‘past experiences cannot haunt me’. And yet despite not being able to relive the trauma of dehumanisation at the hands of my own family, I still live with the fact that I am and have always been truly alone in this world.

The reality is that there is nothing special about this condition. I only see it as a curse of eternal dissatisfaction with life. Everyone tells you the meaning of life are the relationships you build along the way. And yet I am even robbed of that experience. Because how am I supposed to understand relationships when they exist to me as facts and not lived experience? There is always a sense of cold detachment between me and the people in my life.

I’d imagine friendship would feel different if a picture of them can cause a flooding of emotions and memories as you start to relive the moments of shared laughter, recall mundane stories they’ve told, and remember the bond you’ve shared. I have never felt true connection and yet everyone demands a performance of it or they would leave. How do I explain to them that I want to care and love but my brain won’t let me form lasting connections?

With it all, I am constantly envious of everyone else’s ability to be human while I only exist on the edge, never truly privy to the human experience and yet embodying the physical body of one. There is something so distressing about the idea that my storyline is always incomplete even in my own head. If everyone is truly their own main character, then what does it mean for my character’s incapability in having a complex internal narrative? Doesn’t it render me forever incomplete and underdeveloped?

I remember crying and heaving, overwhelmed with envy and rage, until my chest was hurting, desperately gasping for air. The realisation of my life dawned on me that night. I will never experience humanity in the same way that decades of artists and philosophers have beautifully painted it to be. And life will forever be isolating without the reliable comfort of nostalgia and human connection. And I will be forever destined to chase for fulfillment, however fleeting those feelings may be without the capabilities of capturing memories.

All my life, I’ve tried so hard to recreate the memories that my brain cannot capture. I took thousands of pictures, made vlogs, written journals, and collected every single scrap of trash that I thought would mean something to me someday. I became a collector of my own life story. The logic was that if my brain won’t remember my life, then I’ll have to capture and collect every single moment of my life to make my brain remember. But with time, everything just ends up being meaningless. The beer bottle from my first time ever watching a drag show will not elicit the feelings of queer joy I felt that night. A picture from the night my friend and I spent laying in a field pouring our heart to each other will not bring back that feeling of intimacy. Every single moment and every single feeling will only pass through, my brain doesn’t want any of them to stay, the good ones or the bad ones. But does it really mean that I am now left with nothingness?

Maybe with my condition, contentness can only be found in the acceptance of this tragedy. I could never experience life the way that I’ve been told to experience it, but maybe I can redefine, for myself, what it means to live a meaningful life. But, in order to do that, I must stop chasing to live ‘normally’ and to throw away what I know about what it means to live and experience life.

Cover photo by MART PRODUCTION: https://www.pexels.com/photo/technology-computer-head-health-7089331/