What Do You Do With a Bad Memory?
When repackaging only goes so far
What are you supposed to do when you remember something awful? When you’re in the middle of a conversation and a thought so ugly, but also so undeniably true, rises to the surface of your mind-pond? You’ve looked it over, head tilting, examining it and acknowledging it. It’s a doozy; there’s a reason it was buried. And yet, there it is, maybe for the first time in a year — or 10. Maybe for the first time since, as you are realizing, it happened. Now what?
This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. Serious answers need only apply.
I read somewhere that you are supposed to “re-package” trauma before putting it back — a frame of reference sort of thing. This practice makes sense to me on some levels. Here, in my personal online coping space, I write about hard things in order to process them, to put words around the feelings. I write to reframe the floods so that when they come around the next time, I don’t need to panic or vomit or sleep for three days.
So yeah, repackaging helps. But it still sucks.
For example, you’re sitting at a stoplight, sipping your lemonade, and your mind wanders back to that strip mall Italian joint that served the kind of gnocchi dreams are made of. You’re mentally routing the thirty-minute drive to get there — where is it again? — and then you remember that it’s just around the corner from St. Joe’s Hospital. Your wires cross and the thing, some monstrous recollection that insists upon its existence, surfaces like some swamp creature. Your brain, feeling nothing short of electrocuted, seizes. She died in the same building you were born.
The light turns green and it’s time to accelerate. That’s true, I tell my cerebral muck pond. But it’s just one more little way we are connected. No such thing as coincidence. That’s me, reframing my thoughts. This part still feels cheesy, and sometimes I can’t come up with anything, so I just mentally nod and say hello. I don’t smile at it because I’m also learning not to smile or apologize when things bump into me, whether it’s in the produce section or my own swamp-mind.
It’s the ‘putting it back’ that’s the impossible part. Ok, Reframed Monster. A long, awkward silence passes. You can go now.
Entitled little bastards can’t take a hint.
This is the most true with the memories you didn’t know you had — the ones you’ve never played with. The ones where you’re alone and you go to open a door and the palm of his hand is pushed flat on your back. You froze. You didn’t do anything. You didn’t say anything. Pathetic.
On a first go around, your reframe game is understandably weak. I was so young. Trusting people isn’t wrong. It can take a while to come up with something mildly empowering. I’m not that person anymore. If that happened today, I’d react differently.
And, as I’ve learned, then you sit and stare at your uninvited house guest for as long as they need. No curfew. No calling the authorities. Even if you ignore them or take deep breaths or meditate or drink a smoothie or go for a run or call your mom, they’ll just sort of be there, leaving dirty dishes in the sink and crumbs in your bed.
I accept that these houseguests exist, I just don’t approve.
Now what?
