Memory Isn't a Filing Cabinet

If someone asked you to tell the story of your life, where would your memory begin?

When I started writing, I think some part of me expected memory to work like a filing cabinet. Which is ridiculous because the therapist in me knew damn well that isn't how memory works. Still, I somehow imagined I would sit down, open the appropriate drawer, pull out the correct year, find what I needed, write about it, put the folder back, and move on.

You know, something nice and orderly:

→ 1982

→ 1983

→ 1984

→ Important Shit

→ Traumatic Shit

→ Happy Shit

→ Random Shit That Will Become Relevant in Forty Years

Apparently, my brain did not receive that organizational memo.

The irony isn't lost on me that I actually have a filing bin filled with folders organized by year from my ancestry research. I can organize the physical evidence of my life chronologically, no problem. Getting my brain to cooperate? That's an entirely different fucking story.

The more I wrote, the more I remembered. And none of it had the courtesy to arrive in chronological order.

One memory would surface while I was writing another. Something about a room would remind me of another room. A conversation would bring back something someone had said years earlier. A person would remind me of an event, which would remind me of another person, which would suddenly drop me into a completely different period of my life.

And there I would be thinking, Holy shit. I forgot about that.

Sometimes the connection made perfect sense. Other times I couldn't have explained why one memory unlocked another if you'd paid me.

It felt less like opening a filing cabinet and more like pulling on a thread. I'd tug on one little piece, thinking I knew where it went, only to discover it was tangled around something else. Then that piece was attached to another. Before I knew it, something I had started writing about one period of my life had pulled a memory from years earlier to the surface.

That changed the way I thought about remembering.

There were things I had assumed I'd forgotten. Maybe some of them I had. There are still gaps in my memory, and I've had to become comfortable with the fact that some of those gaps may always be there.

But other memories didn't feel gone once they resurfaced. They felt like they had simply been sitting somewhere I hadn't visited in a very long time, waiting for something familiar to knock on the door.

That's what it felt like to me, anyway.

A smell. A room. A song. A sentence. Someone's name. Sometimes all it took was one tiny detail, and suddenly something I hadn't thought about in decades was standing right there.

That made writing a memoir interesting as hell.

Because I'd write something, think I had finished with that particular memory, and move on. Then another memory would surface and I'd realize it belonged with something I'd already written. So I'd go back. I'd add something. I'd make a connection I hadn't seen before.

Sometimes the new memory didn't just add information. It changed the way I understood something I'd already remembered.

That may have been the strangest part.

These events had already happened. Some had happened decades earlier. Nothing about the past itself was changing, but my understanding of it was.

I could suddenly see connections between things that had happened years apart. I could recognize patterns that I couldn't possibly have recognized while I was living them. One memory gave context to another. Something that had seemed isolated suddenly wasn't.

The story wasn't sitting inside me already assembled, waiting for me to transcribe it.

I was discovering it while I wrote.

I didn't remember my life and then write it. Writing helped me remember my life.

Maybe that's one of the reasons The Seeker's Lessons couldn't have been a traditional chronological memoir. My memories didn't arrive that way. My understanding of them didn't arrive that way either.

They came in fragments. Threads. Images. Sensations. Stories I'd told a hundred times and stories I hadn't thought about in years. Some arrived clearly. Some had fuzzy edges. Some brought other memories with them.

And some drawers stayed stubbornly fucking locked.

I had to learn that I didn't need every drawer open to write honestly about what I could remember. I also had to stop expecting memory to give me a perfectly organized account of a life that wasn't lived in perfectly organized chapters.

We don't experience our lives knowing which moments are going to matter forty years later. We don't know which random Tuesday will eventually become part of a much larger pattern. We don't know which conversation will make sense only after another one happens ten years later.

We're just living.

Maybe that's why remembering can feel so messy. We're looking backward with information the person living those moments didn't have yet.

And maybe the mess isn't always something we need to fix. Maybe sometimes we just need to pull the first thread and see what comes with it.

So if someone asked me now where the story of my life begins, I'm not sure I'd give them a year. I'd probably tell them it depends on which thread I pull first.

What might you remember if you stopped trying to tell your story in order and simply started writing what came first?

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