Memories help make us who we are. They are weird, unquantifiable things, that shape the way we see our world. We piece together intricate mosaics using the experiences we go through to form vague impressions, the stuff we then call memories. They usually contain lessons that allow us to learn from prior experiences in order to make new challenges easier to overcome. Sometimes we need to forget unimportant lessons to make way for new ones, and like bits in a computer they are reassembled into something else. We also generalise our memories so that they are easier to recall; if they’re ultra-specific then we’d be too caught up in the details to efficiently apply the past experience to our present situation. In other words, they aren’t perfect, but they are necessary.
Much like dreams, we still don’t know a lot about memories. I’m not looking to answer the question of ‘what is a memory’ but rather work through the infinite jigsaw puzzle of my own memories so that I can figure out why the smell of an old t-shirt makes me cry. There really is an old t-shirt that still smells like the washing liquid that was used on it. I associate that smell with a person as well the memories of being with them. It hits me like a tonne of bricks, and I do know why the smell has that powerful an effect on me; there’s an olfactory bulb running straight from my nose to my brain, with direct connections to my amygdala – the amygdala works with the hippocampus to form a stronger than normal memory to protect me, for if a situation warranted such major emotions, then it must be pivotal to my survival. The stronger the emotion, the more important the memory. On top of this, we add a story. We scrutinise the story, rewrite it, sprinkle it with more emotion, and then the monster of a memory is…remembered forever. I mentioned how we generalise our memories otherwise we’d be overwhelmed (like remembering a birthday party, but not what people wore, who ate what, where they sat). Generalisations can also lead to errors. It’s not uncommon for us to reconstruct a memory and rebuild it incorrectly, using our present feelings or knowledge to guide the process retroactively. Conversely, if we can change the way we see something in the past it can affect how we feel in the present too.
So we’ve established why the smell triggers memories, and how the memories are made ‘important’, but I want to know why the crushing wave of emotions comes with it? The t-shirt for example. I have given it meaning beyond its worth; attached to it is an entire relationship from start to end, including a multitude of strong emotions. It transports me back to a different time, and back then everything is blissful and harmonious. I am happy, life is good, I am unplagued by misery. I know that this is not real, but I can’t convince myself enough to not feel that way. Generalisations – making us look back with rose tinted goggles. Our NostalgiaVision™ showing us the purest heavenly images. When I smell that shirt, it activates all these things in my mind in such a powerful way, telling me there was a time when I felt good but it is not now.
I do often hold onto things from the past. Keepsakes are one of my crutches, tethering me to a time that is no more. They aren’t always bad either. Take my Studio Ghibli onesie. I feel nothing when I pick it up apart from its story. Near the start of the pandemic when I was living with my then girlfriend, she bought us each a onesie. I absolutely refused to put it on, but the world got madder and madder so I thought, why the hell not? We put them on and went to Aldi. Halfway there, she realised I was in my tracksuits underneath, and at about the same time I realised she was not. She was naked. It was too late to go back though. Now, this is a funny little memory; I can talk about it and laugh but the emotions don’t go beyond that. I don’t associate it with any sadness or bitterness. Same with some of the artwork I’ve been given, or the jewellery. I can appreciate them for what they are without being devastated by the weight of anything from the past.
You see, the items themselves don’t haunt me. It’s the pain I have learned to associate with objects (or moments, or memories) that gives me grief. As always with me, it’s wholly self-inflicted. There’s this thing I do when I’m anxious that no one knows I do, and now I’ve started to hold that moonstone bracelet when I feel nervous because it calms me down. Therefore, it is becoming a tool that helps me rather than a hinderance to me moving on. It could easily be heavy on my wrist, weighed down with the pain we associate with a breakup, but it has instead become something that supports me.
It can still hurt to remember things though. I think back on some of my experiences and get a heavy sinking feeling in my heart. It’s like looking in a rear-view mirror while driving; you need to check to see what’s going on but your eyes should really be looking at what’s in front of you. There’s no use getting lost in the past – yet it’s something I do all too often. I dangerously play out memories and assign great value to them. I imagine myself months and months ago sitting in a café with someone, I want to shout at my past self to do more of that and pay more attention to the details and to savour it before it’s over but to no avail, obviously my screams go unheard and that moment like all moments has been and gone. Why does that have to be a bad thing for me? Well, I know that I have a habit of emotionally crippling myself but that’s something to deal with next time.
I’d like to use my memories as a tool to help me. One way of doing this is to look back at past breakups; I can recall several where I thought it was the end of everything only for me to find someone new and realise it’s not over and it’s better than before. It’s happened a few times, it’ll happen again. We tell ourselves that we never loved anyone like that person and it can’t happen another time but it’s simply not the case, even if it really was a special kind of love. None of that love is down to them, it comes from within ourselves. If we felt that love once, we will feel it again not because of the person we are with but because we have the capacity to get to that place. We are capable of loving that deeply, and the person going away doesn’t mean we cannot love deeply again. They were a vessel for it, they may still be a vessel for it, but we are the source.
There’s a philosophical place between Stoicism/Zen, and reality where I’d like to be. It’s a middle ground. Stoic unattachment has always seemed to me like a fear of becoming attached, so they remove attachment completely. I don’t believe that the negating of feelings, a major aspect of the human condition, is a way to find peace. Sounds a bit like denial to me, something I talked about in an old post about gambling. Much like meditation, it’s less about halting all thoughts and instead knowing how to accept them, step back, and keep meditating. The key word is ‘accept’ – for in the acceptance we can acknowledge the attachment and with love we can release it. I hate quoting Bukowski, but I do try to remember his line that ‘love is just the result of a random encounter’, it takes a lot of pressure off us.
The hurt is beginning to hurt less. I understand that I encountered a character passing through my story, they existed to join me during those moments and now they have parted to allow me the chance to continue my story. I was shown emotions I didn’t know I had, and I’ve learned to communicate my feelings in an entirely new way that would have been absolutely unthinkable to me before. I’ve developed my identity again, even started doing things alone now to regain my own sense of self (went to the cinema alone for the first time in 25 years). The memories are of course still following me, the love is still there, but I can accept we’re both going onwards in our journeys. I get woken up by nightmares and struggle late at night when I can’t sleep, I’ve slipped up and made errors, but I think I’m learning a lot about myself during this time and it seems I am going in the right direction. I’m listening to a bit too much Elliott Smith though, but I guess it did prompt me to explore memories:
“Cut this picture into you and me
Burn it backwards, kill this history
Make it over, make it stay away
Or hate’ll sing the ending that love started to say”
This is from Sweet Adeline. As with all his material it’s been dissected to hell, but this first verse has seen a lot of interpretations. For me, it seemed to mirror what I am currently going through. Cutting pictures; it’s a thing we do to forget periods of our life (memories!). When he writes that he cuts a picture of ‘you and me’ I imagine a photo of a couple being cut with scissors straight down the middle to separate them into two individuals rather than a whole unit. The next line, ‘kill this history’ is an interesting one considering the piece I’ve just written. You can burn the image, try as you might, but the history can’t be killed much like our memories. In fact, I don’t know if he even wants to truly burn the image as he warns us of what will happen if it isn’t burned, possibly implying that he doesn’t need to burn them but will instead suffer pain and hatred from it. We do cling to memories even if they are painful because losing them might hurt more.
If I can summarise any of this, it’s that memories are important and we can let them drag us down or lift us up. They are extremely powerful and they play a major role in our everyday lives. On my journey so far, they have been quite difficult for me to deal with but I am working on changing that. I would like to remember past times with a smile instead of a frown, and rather than be a prisoner of my own making, I’d like to be free to move on and accept the actions of people around me. It may be a while until I feel whole again but that’s okay, there’s no rush