Super Memory Not So Super

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023 / Hermionejh

It was within the last few years that I realized that my memory is sometimes radically different than family members and friends. I don’t have exact daily life recall – and certainly don’t remember all events – but I have vivid recall of full or partial conversations and situations from my childhood, and continuing to the present day.

I recently asked a friend if she remembered something from when we spent a lot of time together in our 20’s, and she didn’t, but it was significant to us both at the time.

I didn’t know that my recall of family and friends past activities, events, and conversations was extraordinary – and was often puzzled that they remembered something vague or nothing. My next-oldest sister didn’t even remember that we had gone to see the band, The Police, together until I texted her a picture of the keepsake ticket stub.

Even my son says he barely remembers his childhood – which is either a good thing or a troubling thing – but if I bring up a specific event, he might have some more recollection, but it’s still way more vague than mine.

I heard a scientist on Alan Alda’s podcast, Clear and Vivid With Alan Alda, who remarked that some people are super rememberers, but then he went on to describe how difficult that must be, and it made me break down sobbing.

It hit me so hard because I didn’t have a name or place for that particular grief for the last few decades since I started feeling so alienated, especially from my sisters. I didn’t know that they don’t have the same vivid memories of closeness and togetherness that I do. I thought they just didn’t like me much anymore.

It’s almost like I walk into a room in the past and I see the setting, the people, and re-live certain conversations, and experience the feelings that I had then – hear the jokes and laughter, or the cutting remarks, and sharpness – and they don’t. At all.

I didn’t know that was a not-so-super power of mine that set me up with expectations that we are all still the same as we always were. I mean, I know we’ve changed and grown (or regressed), but I am still the essential self I was born with.

I have to forget my memories if I want to have current relationships with my sisters, but it’s like having to cut out a part of myself – a real, present self that also lives the past. It’s painful.

Getting “over myself,” as I had been admonished to do throughout my early years, was a big fail. I just learned to shut down, but not get “tougher”.

Being sensitive is a blessing and a curse. Not only am I highly sensitive to moods, but I almost always know when there’s a ‘presence’ – whether a spirit or left-over energy somewhere – and I seem to have the ability to direct healing energy, but I have zero idea how that works. I just know I feel it, and people tell me they receive it.

The irony is that I can’t seem to heal myself, or my progress is glacially slow.

I am hoping my new understanding about being a super rememberer will somehow help me feel less estranged from those I care about. I’m not the only one like this, even if I’m the only one in my immediate circle.

It’s also a reminder to get my memoir done while my memory is still so sharp!

Good Grief

July 26, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Time has been a strange concept for me. Sometimes I feel like my life has been one long day, and other times it feels like I’ve lived several lives since I was born.

I have clung to people in my past that didn’t cling back, even though we seemed so close at the time. I am lucky to still have a few people in my life that have been my friends through a lot if not most of the journey so far.

I try practicing the Buddhist idea of non-attachment, and try as I might, I still have attachments. I have put time, love and energy into people who seemed to feel the same, but have detached, or our connection didn’t mean to them what it meant to me.

We change. Our desires or our focus shifts and we either fall into, or choose, new groups of friends or acquaintances that give us more of what we’re looking for, maybe?

It’s about acceptance too. I keep hearing the lyric: “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with,” from Love The One You’re With by Stephen Stills.

I naively assumed that the people that were with me then experienced our connection the same way – that it mattered as much to them as it did to me.

It’s not bad or good, it just is. The challenge is to accept that. It’s not like I hadn’t been living my life anyway, but I have to incorporate it differently in my mind, and not interpret it like there is something wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with me – or at least nothing that the right pharmaceutical can’t dampen. (Kidding – sort of). I’m still waiting to get into a therapeutic psychedelics treatment.

Honestly, losing my mother, one of my best friends, and two other very good friends in the space of three years has been really hard. I miss my mom so much lately. It’s more the idea of her, I think – like my longing for someone to make my pain less raw. It’s more archetypal than actual because my mother wouldn’t have won any parenting awards. I think I did better, but guaranteed I still fucked up my kid no matter how hard I tried not to.

This has felt so convoluted, but it’s not, it’s grief. Grief is weird and distorting. It feels never ending and frightening to me – like if I feel it deeply I will dive into the darkness and never resurface – but that’s just not true.

Amnesia seems like it would be an ideal solution, but that would just cause other problems. Balance will return, but it will take a lot longer if I keep stuffing this grief under every internal couch cushion I can find, or shoving it way into my psyche’s back closet.

Time, Time, Time

September 22, 2022September 22, 2022 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

I hear Tom Waits singing the refrain: “Oh it’s time, time, time…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAB4uGGquX4

It’s more the song’s tone rather than the lyrics that make me think about our time-based life.

The garden so green, so colorful – so heavy with tomatoes, beans, corn, squash, and flowers just a few weeks ago is emptier – strewn with scraggly vines and stalks – the last ripening food and flowers know the end is near. The tomatoes will continue to ripen until the frost comes, but they are the last stalwarts of the garden.

I reluctantly pulled out my fall clothes suitcase today after seeing the forecast of cooling temperatures this week, with colder nights.

I folded up my shorts and tank tops, my flip-flops will overwinter in the closet.

Autumn is a beautiful season. I have always liked it, but I see it differently now. I have grown and changed. My perspective has expanded, but also contracted.

Summer used to seem longer. It used to be full with friends and parties and nightlife and doings. It’s not that it couldn’t be again, it’s that I’m not that person anymore. I do go out to events at times, but it is not like being in your twenties. I don’t have the energy I had back then. I was biologically as well as psychologically different – and that is okay. I’m not railing against that. I’m just noticing.

Of course there is sorrow – there’s grief in every season, every change. I am grateful that I am aware of the subtle changes now. I have appreciation for so much more than I used to, but I was always appreciative of nature and the earth’s beauty and bounty.

It’s easy to look back and be an “armchair quarterback” about my life – but that’s not fair or accurate because I didn’t have the information that I do now – and I likely wasn’t supposed to.

I wasted so much of this precious commodity called time. I knew it even when I was younger, but I wasn’t able to act differently then. I am more able now, but not by much. I have found strategies that help me, but they’re not foolproof. Platitudes are easy. Life is not, or it hasn’t been for me.

I can be joyful in the struggle. I can be miserable too… I’m more often just moving through my day, working on or completing tasks.

I had grander visions for my life – high aspirations. I think it gave me goals to work toward. I think I have done pretty well with what was handed to me.

Time’s drumbeat throbs more loudly now, but it may be what I need to finish up my work, and do all I can to have who and what is important in my life, and let go of the rest.

Kit-Cat Klock

January 26, 2013May 19, 2015 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

Kit-Cat Klock (Photo credit: World of Oddy)

I bought a Kit-Cat Klock for my son one Christmas, nearly ten years ago now. He had it hung up in his room, and when we moved, I was happy to see that he put it back up on his wall. I really like the way its eyes and tail move back and forth, but it’s not the most accurate time piece. This one is battery operated, but I think the original Kit-Cat Klock was electric.

When my son went to college, the clock remained here, even though I suggested taking it as a memento of home. I removed the battery and put it with his things that I’m keeping in case he wants it in the future, which I realize isn’t likely, but you never know. If he ever has kids they might enjoy stuff that was once their Dad’s, or at least having a physical connection from the past to the present.

I was cleaning the other day and saw the clock and decided to dust it off, put a battery in, and stick it up on the wall. I forgot how much pleasure I take in simple things, and I’m so glad I decided to claim it, and went through the trouble to put it up.