On Forgetting
Memory is a mysterious part of the human experience. You can recall countless events, some of which were important — graduations, funerals, etc.— but most of which were not. Things that were immensely important as they happened can disappear from our memory completely. Major events, huge changes in how we live daily, fade away as time passes.
As an example, I have absolutely no memory of my first day at school. Sure, that was when I was five, but it must have been a huge paradigm shift that permanently changed my life, right? Hell, I can’t remember my first day of middle school, high school, or college, either. I’m nineteen. My first day of college was less than a year and a half ago, and it was a big deal. Probably not as big of a deal as my first day of kindergarten, but I don’t know. I can’t remember either.
Perhaps stranger than what we don’t remember is what we do. It makes sense that one wouldn’t remember the first days of things: you don’t know how important something will be until it’s over. I don’t remember my first day of high school, but I do remember graduating(granted, it was during the year 2020, so it was notable even among graduations). That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the incredible tenacity of memories of embarrassment.
I think everybody has had the experience of lying awake at night, thinking of some dumb thing you said or did years ago that you still remember. You could speculate that this was an evolutionary advantage; perhaps remembering dumb things you did made you more likely to survive in the future, but this isn’t escaping a lion we’re talking about. Memories of intense fear seem far more useful, but I struggle to remember even a single time that I was afraid of something. I’m sure the first time I had to speak in front of a group of people, I was absolutely terrified, but that memory completely eludes me. That time I tripped and fell in front of a pretty girl, though? Burned into my brain forever. In fact, what we remember and what we forget doesn’t seem to correlate with anything at all.
After writing about all these things I’ve forgotten, I want to mention something I remember. I know that, while trying to fall asleep, I’ve thought about the fact that we must have some period of time while we are still awake, before we fall asleep, but will never remember anything we are thinking about. More than that, I’ve thought about the fact that I remember thinking about this span, with no recollection of any details aside from that I’ve done it. When you think about it, many of our memories are like this. You probably don’t remember any particular trip to the grocery store unless something really interesting happened, but obviously you know that you’ve made boring trips to the grocery store. That’s weird, right? It doesn’t make sense that you can remember that an event happened but forget the event. It feels like, somehow, you’re simultaneously remembering and forgetting an event, and there’s clearly a contradiction there.
I don’t know how memory works. I’m not a psychologist, or a memory specialist, or anybody special that works with memory. What I am is a person who remembers things. More importantly, though, I’m a person who forgets things. I’m not even sure that asking how memory works is the correct question. There’s a reason this post is titled Forgetting and not Memory, after all. I’m not sure that we’ll ever understand exactly how our memories work, and how our brains subconsciously choose what to discard. What I do think, though, is that the question of forgetting is far more insightful than the question of remembering.