Thank God For Memory Loss

On the eve of what is likely to be my last round in the ring with institution of American Summer Camp I feel...nothing. Except anxiety over my inability to fall asleep because my body refuses to believe that it has left California.

I have none of the pangs of nervousness that preceded the bus ride up to my sleep away camp every June. None of the suffocating realizations before the kids arrived when it was clear that I was responsible for human lives. I feel none of the social apprehension about making friends, making a good impression, or making sure everyone knows I take myself seriously. And at this moment of levity I a recurring thought resurfaces: How great is it that we forget things?

With the slightest prodding, riptides of prepubescent awkwardness and the cyclical feeling of inferiority that accompanies any age that ends in "teen" baptize me with shame anew. I remember times I laughed cruelly, and made people feel bad, and made embarrassing mistakes, and wore clothes inside out. I remember feeling frozen with fear that I would spend the rest of my life alone, unworthy of attention or social contact.

Wasn't high school terrible? Wasn't middle school worse?

And yet, for 23.75 hours a day I am completely free of these recollections of my mediocrity. I can live in the now and aspire to things despite my moronic inner voice reminding me of  my own mistakes. It feel fabulous to live in the now and make decisions based on the recent past. To be free on the constraints of my own expectations is as liberating as skinny sky diving.

And to not just be free of my own behavior, the way I treated my sisters (pulling their hair and punching them in the face) and the way I treated everyone else (like they were wrong and I was right), but to free for even brief pockets of time of the I understood the world, allows me refreshing clarity.

It's upsetting and disorienting and challenging to forget. Being so close, nothing seems sadder than forgetting the minutiae of my sophomore apartment or my on campus job or the organization I loathed to be a part of. But in reality, they'll soon slip from the foreground, and I will be left with rosy memories, the highlight real, and will be spared the embarrassment of my wrongdoings.

I know that if I had Alzheimers I would wish for it all back: the good, the bad, and the ugly. But as I attempt to trudge through this time around, I can't help but imagine how much more burdensome life would be if we had to carry everything around with us. Packing is not a skill reserved for travel. And how wonderful that we get to choose what we carry around with us. Not mosquito nets or sun hats, but rather the parts of ourselves, our compassion or our wit or our resolve, that we want to inform the future versions. The versions that will eventually and hopefully become the past we can be proud of.

I'm struggling with the past-present-future pull because being back in my old house, in my old town, with my tragically overbearing and dismissive parents (an impressive combination if I do say so myself) I am so readily reminded of all the parts of myself that I hate and what I could so easily become. So how do I let go of that while holding on to the more recent past which seems so at odds with every feature of this snow globe to which I've returned? I changed, but how do I avert regression? How do I forget the reminders without forgetting the convictions which I now know to be true?

A challenge for certain, but perhaps one that I need to face to earn the life I want. Or perhaps this is the bullshit I am obligated to feed myself in order to survive the next twelve months.

Warning: My next post might be about apartment hunting