drowning in a perpetual self
written january 8, 2025
The wise women of my life are devoted memory-keepers. They act as custodians for each other’s stories, and for ours, shuffling cardboard boxes and softcover folders from one attic to the next, down to one child or another, adding to and removing from different libraries over decades.
They are historians, collectors, curators determining which material pieces of your past make it to your present.
Things like the garish jester costume they dressed you in for your first Halloween – which of course you don’t remember, but cherish because of its circuitous reminder that it must elicit a significant memory for them.
It’s a quiet love language that remains largely invisible during its hardest work; it requires anticipating what your loved ones might treasure years from now, and the patience to let their experience ferment into nostalgia so that you can help them travel back in time later.
Unsurprising, then, that I picked up the habit of squirrelling away small mementos for myself.
Some things in my giant tub of keepsakes are clearly sentimental – yearbooks, awards, my dad’s childhood Pac-Man sheets that I slept on my first year away from home. Other things are less obvious, like a pair of Magic Hat bottlecaps and some plastic beads.
Each item instantly transports me to somewhere not-here: the diner in Five Points that inevitably preceded some kind of trouble; my grandmother’s kitchen; the roof outside my bedroom window, pen in one hand and cigarette in another, my neighbors’ laughs and marijuana smoke wafting from the backyard.
This ability to transcend time and space is addicting once you get the hang of it. You start to recognize what cues your memory best, and it becomes a game you play with yourself to see how well you can preserve a moment with the most unassuming tokens.
Maybe because this didn’t keep the memories as potent as I wanted, or because of how impractical it is to objectify every day of my life, or because of a few other complexes that come to mind, this neuroses grew to encompass all of my writing.
It wasn’t enough anymore to have a memento; I had to relive every experience on paper, in painstaking detail. Otherwise I found myself in the vertigo of uncertainty, of relying on the fallible memory of an unreliable narrator. To write was to know, and to preserve the knowing.
The page was no longer an opportunity, but an archive. The story had already been told, and my only job was to document, reflect, analyze, synthesize, describe, conclude.
This quickly became my superpower, my fun fact, what many of my friends know me for. If you give me a date from (most of) the past decade, there is a world of context I can immerse myself in. Some of it feels soulless – what I ate, what and how much I drank, what I watched on television – but some of it, when I revisit, pulls me so deeply into myself that I can hardly surface for air.
It feels complicated, that this satisfies two such diametrically opposed parts of me: one part that values romance and sentimentality; and one that feels desperate and unable to prove myself, and which feeds on this compulsion’s self-fulfilling prophecy that I can’t trust myself or my memory.
And also, it insists upon itself, etc.
The more distance that stretches between my present and past, the more relieved I am to be able to dance between them.
When you learn how to excavate your history, to follow the threads of your own mind to their beginning, you become a scholar of the self. You fall perpetually down the rabbit holes of your psyche, communing with temporal doppelgangers who are both you and not, here and there.
Eventually, you become so dedicated to untangling what tethers your today to all of your yesterdays that it becomes impossible to find the fibers trying to weave your tomorrow. You’re sure that there must be a bottom, an end to this self-important cave diving, but you never find it. There is always something beneath the beneath.
To know yourself through time is at once an explosive, erotic experience and an anticlimax.
There are pieces of you that, once you find them, will crash back into your consciousness with a certainty that shatters all illusions of before. This feels like a physical metamorphosis, a fundamental change of your shape in the world. There are pieces of you that remain elusive and coy. There are still others who you may never find, who taunt you from the most haunted and unreachable depths of your being.
I’ve long considered this nebulous process an art. Dialoguing with the self is the most sacred expression of love I’ve found. It is a skill, to control the ascent of your own accumulated darkness to the surface, to meet it with curiosity.
But now, a new question: Who am I without a record of her?
Do I know my life because I’ve lived it, or because I can read it back? Is this an act of craft, or have I relegated myself to the slow-drip torment of reproductive labor?
I see myself clearly, but too much, as if I’m looking into a reflection of cascading selves. I read myself back as I wrote an experience that I lived from the perspective of writing it down later. And then I remember myself reading, and I am suddenly so splintered that I’m ripped from my body entirely, from reality as I’ve logged it.
Inevitably, I pull myself back by holding something small, a token hidden away by me or someone who loves me. I cling to what I can touch: a washcloth, a paper bag, a coin, each humming with their own histories.
In these moments, which are increasingly common, I feel at once untethered and grounded. Curious and certain; insignificant and capable.
I’m comfortable now, I think, in this relentless state of flux, where everything is this and instead of this or. I’m learning to let the edges of myself blur into nothingness and everythingness. To allow the page to be both a canvas and a mirror.