Memories
Living with your memories has always been something I struggled with. There is a fine balance to find between living in your memories and living with your memories. It has been and it is still quite difficult for me to know which one I am doing.
Keeping my memories alive had several benefits on my life, I could not learn from my mistakes if I couldn’t remember them. However, I need to refrain myself from thinking too much about them, because this could undermine my self-representation. The image I have from myself, I am not a failure, representing my past mistakes. This is true as much as I am not my successes, where these could not happen without my or other failures.
There are memories that I can easily keep in some drawers, I could pick them when I think about them, or something related to them. These memories, this past, are the easiest one to deal with. Often they are things that you can look or think of with a certain distance. There are no attachment to them anymore. I chose to remember them.
I remember them to remind me of my past self, not the current one. There is a clear link between who I was and who I am but, this is no more than a link.
There are other memories, the ones that are still living with me. They are, somehow, still connected to my person. They come on their own in my every day life. They shaped me more that I realized at that time and I have harder time to define that memory itself. It could be nostalgia, more a feeling than a precise memory, but they can still be represented by clear moments of my past life.
Like any memory, they are fragment of past that can never be reached again. But even if I can never reach these moments again, they can easily reach me. Like spirits, they are never far but never really here.
The difficulty with these memories, and for any memory actually, is that they are personals. They sometimes happened with other people, but I can very rarely find someone to share this memory with. Someone that was there and remember the memory with the same feeling, or just remember it is hard to find. The memory you have from that event have probably diverged from other participants.
It is a funny thing, the fact that the memories are usually changing over time. We cannot really know what has changed but we can be certain that something has. Everyone has its own interpretation or feeling about a specific event, and after that, as you keep changing the souvenir of this moment on your own, there is actually no way that you can discuss the memory with someone else with the exact same view on it.
At the end, memories are unreachable and inexpressible. I am living with my own memories and I am bound to keep them to myself. As I previously mentioned, there are memories that are still defining me in the present, but they can hardly be narrated, even less in a coherent manner.
But why is it so hard ? Why do I struggle with that ? It is the same for everyone and no one else seem to struggle with it… Why am I the only one having hard time to know how to live with my memories ?
The fact that I write these lines down in this blog post is because I think that I am not the only one feeling that way. Are there other people with efficient strategies on how to deal with that ?
Living with or in your memories is a thin line. Your memories bring you experience, joy or discomfort but also this feeling that you are, at the end, the only one living that memory again.