Empty Horizons, Cloudless Skies – Personal Experience (Other) – VA 2017
Imagine standing in a place with no clouds and flat ground, featureless terrain as far as the eye could see. Imagine no matter how far you walked in any given direction nothing changed: the horizon still remained flat, the sky never changed, and your trail of footsteps faded back into the ground after a short while. Try to grasp a glimpse of the grating anger that would gnaw at you. Welcome to memory loss, a problem so terrifying it defies imagination. It takes away much of what makes us people.
René Descartes is famous for his “Cogito Ergo Sum” – “I think, therefore I am.” I feel that’s insufficient. A crow can think, it can use tools to solve problems and yet we do not treat it as beings like we do ourselves. Similarly, I can think but I don’t feel like a complete being. I look at: the jobs I can do, my relationships with other people, my hobbies, and my personal growth over the last several years, and I’ve come to learn a great deal of how much I’ve lost.
Memories provide a foundation from which to build. Through our own experiences, and the experiences of our mentors, we elevate ourselves from the ground and continuously reach for the heavens. As Isaac Newton said “If I have seen further, it is standing on the shoulders of giants.” I try my hardest to gain a foundation from which to build, but find myself stuck with entry level tasks. I stare at things that in my heart I know I’ve learned before, and weep with the realization I know not what they are any longer. I want to amend Descartes’ statement to “I remember, therefore I am.”
Our pasts guide us into the future in all we do. Try to imagine being in a relationship with someone and failing to remember important: conversations, events, dates, places, names, and more. When they come back up at a later date, the panic is likely to be written all over your face as it is mine. Either you find someone very understanding and forgiving or no one at all. Not everyone wishes to repeat themselves for you.
I’ve learned to be resourceful to try to compensate for having a blank slate in my head. I looked up both quotes for this essay, I found them to be fitting so I incorporated them in and tried to make them seem like I planned for them to be there all along. When you constantly are caught off guard due to memory loss, you learn to adapt. I’ve learn on a daily basis that I’ve lost something else, and I try to roll with it the best I can. Every day I fall further behind other people my age.
Memory loss is not selective. It is an all-encompassing, relentless, malady. Imagine forgetting the beginning of a movie while you’re still watching it. Imagine not knowing the words to your favorite song, that you’ve been listening to for twenty years. Imagine not developing a muscle memory when practicing a craft or an art. No foundation from which to build. Every success I feel is shocking, I succeed despite myself. Every failure is predictable. Disorientation is familiar, and anxiety follows me around like a shadow on a sunny day.
“I remember, therefore I am.” I don’t remember, therefore I am not. Very large sections of my life simply don’t exist. In fact, the overwhelming majority of my life never happened. If anything happens for me at all it’s in an abstract way. I have no ability to discern three weeks ago from three months ago and three days ago is difficult at best. When people tell me about myself, I have to make a determination as to trust their story because, chances are, I have no recollection of it in the slightest. Rarely, does something trigger a memory for me. I don’t often have an “Oh yeah!” moment. It’s just gone. I wander a world of empty horizons and cloudless skies, a dehumanized being.