Memory: Did It All Really Happen?

Can you remember exactly what happened?

It’s not that I have forgotten about my blog now that I’m not on a contract; quite the contrary really. I’ve given quite some thought as to what I would to say on certain topics, but haven’t had the time what with working the usual forty hours a week, and scrounging up the few free hours I have for other projects. Swap out the forty hour work week for a full-time school schedule, which happens to immediately coincide with New York Fashion Week, and you are granted a recipe for a lack of posting.

Before last week, I had spent my time imagining how my meeting with the Head Honcho, the Psychiatrist, and Quality Management would follow suit. Had I not opted for trip across the border for the long weekend, then my mind would not have to conjure up imaginative scenarios. In any case, in playing this “waiting game,” if you will, I began to question the idea of memory.

Over the past year, it comes as no surprise to some that my mind has been constantly reconstructing every event and moment to as fine a point of accuracy as I could manage. In other words, I’ve been doing my best to preserve my memories, not wanting to forget or to corrupt them in any manner. Each minute detail was something that I would be able to recall – exact phrasing, decor, and other minute details.

I suppose, in part, that’s why I began telling this story; not only to offer the idea that being candid about experiences is something that we should claim and not hide, but also to properly archive it all. Even though I felt my memory to be correct, I wanted to not have to cling to every bit of it, while filing my report. At a certain point, it almost seemed to me as though it was necessary to be recall every fact from my perspective otherwise I would be discredited or not have a premise for complaint.

As I’ve done before, in expelling this truth and these feelings, it seems as though that I let go of my grip on these memories rather loosely. Subsequently, these memories are no longer as close to me as they once were. In fact, there seems to be this elongated distance between myself and the events, as though they happened much farther ago than they did. And that, too, becomes problematic as I awaited our meeting date. I felt estranged from what I had said, and in some moments, I found myself wondering if it was all real. But in reading through my records and my own entries, I realize that it all did happen.

The difficulty in recognizing this truth is the fact that at this point, I am no longer fixated with that particular time frame of my past. Perhaps it was in this transition between having a watchful eye in preserving each minute detail, followed by the detailed report filed that posed a problem. The shock lay in my inability to recognize my own memory in a different context; in filing my report and arching the events on my blog, I no longer had a need to keep them in the forefront of my mind. Instead, they’ve been relegated to the background, amongst other things of that time period, and it is that correctly placed chronological figure that I cannot recognize, especially so soon after.

Following this post, I’ll discuss what has come out of my report in terms of what changes have been made to the counseling/psychiatric program for employees, students, and interns at NYU.

Image courtesy of sxc.hu