Moments from the Past

Admittedly, my first instinct was to say yes to this prompt. After more consideration I realized that I wouldn’t want to trade all of the personal growth I’ve experienced over the last year and a half for an easier or simpler moment in the past. But while thinking about the prompt, I realized that memories are a complicated version of reality because of the imperfections inherent in the human brain, which seeks to categorize things neatly. Because of this, the memories that stand out to me have either a good or bad stamp on them, with very little in between, which means that much of reality is lost in translation.

I think generally humans are able to spot the bad in things better than the good, so those memories that I view as unquestionably good are easier to poke holes into than the bad ones. The first time that I got to perform the lead role in the Nutcracker is a memory that stands out as unequivocally good. This role meant so much to me because it was one that I doubted I would ever get to dance after an injury the year prior, so getting to display all of my hard work successfully on stage was probably one of the most rewarding moments in my life, which makes it difficult to find anything bad in this memory.

However, this framing actually leaves out many of the other emotions I was feeling during this performance. It is easy to forget the mind numbing anxiety I experienced leading up to the show or my mistrust of my partner and the fears that I was injured again (due to a twisted ankle) and unable to perform the part well. Of course, everything went well during the performance, but looking back on this memory more thoroughly I can see how this time in my life was not unequivocally good, even if it still stands out that way.

Although harder to recognize, the same holes can be poked into the memories labeled as exclusively bad. One that stands out was while I was still in the most painful part of understanding and healing from my chronic pain condition. I remember a particularly sad moment after I had recently gotten a feeding tube, and doctors were confident that I would be able to take the tube out in a couple weeks. A month later I still had the tube and went to get it replaced for the first time. 

Understandably I felt it was my fault for failing to recover according to my doctors’ schedule, and was worried that doctors had been so wrong about my recovery. But looking back now, I can see how my experience has impacted me positively in ways that were unpredictable at the time. Labeling this memory as unequivocally bad erases the closer bonds that I grew with my family and friends among other things, but it is noticeably much harder for me to find positives in this situation than it is to find negatives in the other.  

I think it’s interesting to compare my own analysis on the two polar memories, because it really illustrates how flawed memories and our perceptions of them can be. I’ve noticed that good memories seem to require the absence of bad, as if anything bad taints the memory away from good and towards neutral. That is why I can easily question the validity of a good memory with any example of difficulty, while a bad memory with some good doesn’t change its status as a bad memory. 

So I can see why sometimes it sounds nice to escape into the past, but it’s usually only an illusion because we willfully forget the reality of what happened or how we felt in exchange for a more simplistic, pleasant, and categorized version of the past that our brains have unknowingly constructed for us.