I have always written things down, so I can remember them.
This iteration really started when I was in a tumultuous and destabilizing relationship and I started writing down our fights – what happened, how I felt, what I was going do – so I wouldn’t forget that moment. The swirling chaos of this partnership, this marriage, made it so difficult to not forget how I was being treated, what was being said, so that apologies could repeated over and over and the blame for things I didn’t deserve could be glazed in layers so thick that I would eventually believe they were true. I was trying to keep my head above water in the middle of storm that threatened to drown me entirely.
As I grew stronger and more trusting of myself and my perception of reality, writing took the form of helping me come to terms with my overwhelming and intense anxiety. Instead of crashing waves in a storm my memory had turned into a deep, dark wood, where I had to delicately grasp on to almost imperceptible threads to lead me out.
Even when I didn’t have the focus to write, I would do other things. The period after my marriage ended, I would make playlists of songs I was feeling, or that came to me that month, as well as songs playing in the backgrounds of the bars and restaurants and shows and friend’s houses I would find myself in, so I could conjure a mental picture, an emotional image of each point in my life.
Whenever I stop writing, stop trying to remember, I lose the plot. I am despairing and lost, I can’t remember anything, and sometimes I don’t want to. I’ve lost years to working my life away, drinking desperately at home with the shades drawn, distracting myself with unimportant things that drain the life out of me.
The past 5 months of my life have been centered on loss. I lost my career of 11 years. I lost my self worth and self confidence I had tied to that. I lost a relationship, the relationship, that I thought was going to be for the rest of my life. And then, at the end, I lost one of my best friends. What he lost was so much greater than anything I had, and the joy, hardships, despair and elation that life brings he is not able to experience any longer. I never want to not remember him. I want to remember every detail.
I want to remember the crush of my ego dying and feeling useless and incapable. I want to remember the ever increasing, constant dread and sorrow of the cruelty of my partner shutting me out. As painful as it is, I want to remember the sharp unreality of the past two weeks, the grief and regret, the feeling that all of the pain and loss previously described is petty, and small, and doesn’t matter anymore. And I want to keep remembering everything else yet to happen, all the miserable lows and soaring highs, all the things and people still to be found, and lost.
I’ve never written publicly before, I was too ashamed to look self indulgent or self obsessed or unable to look past my own pain. But simply put, that all seems like it doesn’t matter anymore. And I am if nothing, a Libra. So read along, or don’t, I don’t even really mind if I am shouting into the void, because I need this space, these memories, and they are for me first. Nothing ever really dies if you always remember.
