So, a friend of mine on twitter gave me a “Would you rather…” scenario, and I found it very insightful, partially because I knew my answer immediately, and partially because my immediate answer revealed something about myself to myself.
The question was:
And I immediately knew that I would prefer to lose all of my memories than my sight. My first thought as I tried to rationalize my instinct was that I was still young; my life is mostly ahead of me and I can form new memories. That much was true, and yet I knew there was something more to be said.
It hit me today while I was showering: I actually want to forget. It’s not just that I value my eyesight over my memories, it’s that I really do wish I could erase about a quarter of my life à la Men in Black. It’s only been in the last year or so that I actually found myself loving life.
That seems a rather harsh inditement of my life; I would rather have not lived it. Intellectually, I know that’s wrong, I know a lot of the bad has worked out for good, but it doesn’t change the fact that most of my memories seem so unhappy, are always full of fear and anger and pain.
And it is my eyes, I find, that are my escape. A sunrise or sunset, a river, an ocean, but seeing, experiencing beauty—it’s the only escape I have from the horror of my mind.
I know people who have had it so much worse than I. I was raised by loving parents and, on the whole, have had a very good life; I would estimate about 75% of it was good, but it’s not the good memories that come back to me. For the life of me, as I write this, any good memory I can recall has no emotion with it. I don’t feel happy thinking of my happy memories, but I do feel bad thinking of my bad memories.
It might be nice to forget.
Tale Told 