Who knew there was an actual term for losing your memory during trauma? Apparently it’s called Dissociative Amnesia. How official. How clinical. How completely useless. I don’t care what it’s called — I just know it’s a giant pain in the ass. Huge portions of my memory? Gone. Vanished. Deleted like I accidentally hit “select all” and “backspace” on my own life. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember. Dates, events, conversations — all missing like they never happened.
Which is especially inconvenient when you’re, say, recounting events to the police or a CPS investigator. Nothing says “trustworthy adult” like staring blankly while someone asks you basic questions about things you literally lived through. I was there. I interacted with the event. I even had feelings about it, I think. But when asked to recall it? Poof. Gone like a wisp of a breeze. You feel it, you live it, but when you need to remember it, your mind pulls the emergency brake and leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere.
It happened to me several times during my WTF year. When the investigator asked about Rowan’s assault, I couldn’t give her a single solid answer. Not the day, not the sequence, not the exact words. She stared at me like I was auditioning for the role of “Village Idiot #3.” Then I went to the police to report the same assault, and again — nothing. Just me, sounding like I’d been concussed by my own life. All I could remember was finding him and Alex telling me she’d kill me if I told anyone. The police brushed it off because I “didn’t have enough details.” Right. Because that’s the real issue here. What kind of parent does that?
Even now, writing about it, I’m still digging through fog trying to find the important pieces. They say your memory is protecting you from seriously harmful events. Great. Love that for me. But what do you do when you actually want to remember? When you need the details because the world demands them, and your brain is like, “Sorry, we’re closed for renovations”?
The worst memory freezes were when I was driving. One minute I’d be cruising along at 60, and the next I’d forget where I was, what I was doing, where I was going, and why. Nothing like suddenly realizing you’re operating a large metal death machine with absolutely no idea what the mission was. I’d pull over, scroll through my GPS like it held the secrets of the universe, and still come up empty. Many times, I just drove home because wandering around aimlessly wasting gas wasn’t on my list of things to do for the day.
So I started writing everything down. Everything. My day planner became an extension of my arm — dates, times, places, what, why, who, the whole saga. It’s the only place the memories don’t disappear. They sit there in ink, refusing to evaporate. And slowly, now that the trauma is over — or at least I hope it is — my memory is working a bit better. I can function like a typical human again, recounting what I did without sounding like I’ve been hit on the head with a frying pan.
The memories do eventually come back, in fractured little shards, but enough to piece together a whole event. The pain doesn’t return, not really. The dread, the terror — that part stays fuzzy, like my brain decided those files were too corrupted to reopen. I know I felt those things, but remembering how they felt is gone, replaced by a dull, factual retelling of the what and how.
Honestly? If my brain could send me a courtesy warning before deleting things, that’d be great.
Signing off before my brain deletes this too,
K.
I'm Still Here. Somehow... 