Reality on a Stick

Apologies up front. This post is not nearly as romantic as the title suggests.

I taught myself some tricks really early on in life that allowed me to memorize sets of information and strings of communication, and hold onto them for longer than most people would try. These tricks, along with my uber-over-achiever attitude, have been at the root of much of the success I have experienced in my academic and professional lives. (Not to toot, but…) Many along the way have expressed envy in this ability and I have even spent a fair amount of time teaching others some of the mnemonic strategies that work for me.

Today, I’d like to tell you about the other side of this seemingly shiny coin.

An obvious yet inescapably torturous fact of life for those with advanced memory skills is that they remember things…. and not always the things they want to remember.

I’ll bet you can’t guess who I spend about half of every day thinking about, can you? I’ll tell you: Flashing through my head, on and off for the better part of each day, are the faces of all the people I may have hurt during the course of my life. It’s depressing, really, and pretty unhealthy I’ve decided. On one hand, I think the reflection has been very productive and may even be directly responsible for my now gentle approach to human interaction. On the other hand, I have come to accept that it is borderline(?) obsessive– and maybe even creepy– that I replay the offending scenarios over and again. Stop, rewind, play. Pause, contemplate, play, stop, rewind, play.

I don’t claim to have a photographic memory, but I am often able to remember conversations (for the most part) in their entirety, especially when they are associated with some degree of trauma. Why would I undergo trauma if I wasn’t the one being hurt? A) My parents and mentors were painstaking in their efforts to teach me the difference between right and wrong, and I was painfully aware that my actions were inexcusably wrong; and B) I was indeed hurting myself along with the would-be victims of my inhumane treatment.

The good news is that I have now reconnected with and offered apologies to almost everyone I feel deserves one. How did they react? Most of them had selective memories and as a result had absolutely no clue what I was talking about, which is always a surprise, but reassuring nonetheless.

Next order of business: work on extinguishing my rampant sense of self-importance

Steve

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