Why are we so obsessed with creating memories?

We have such little control over what our brain can do. But that doesn't stop us from trying...

Photo by Fredy Jacob on Unsplash

Where would you begin your memoirs? Where would I begin mine?

Could it be my first-ever memory, sitting on a wooden chair, holding a red crayon? There was an outline of a balloon in front of me, I scribble coloured it in. Or could it begin with the goat? The thing I’m sure happened, is real but which, perhaps, is fiction. That I will have created this moment, crafted it from family folklore. You see, a goat broke into our house, and ate my dad’s play. This was a story told, a lot. That definitely happened. But my part in it? The thing I can picture? Maybe it didn’t. I crouched, behind my granddad’s green felt footstool, while the goat wandered our living room. Have I just inserted myself into that story? Dad’s not even sure the goat went into the house. And why was I, a three-year-old, alone in there, while my family sat in the sunshine outside? 

We can manipulate our own minds so easily. Yet we use our memories, these totally unreliable narrators, as a tool for how we think of our own lives.

I think about memories a lot. How desperate we are to create them, how desperate we are to keep them. They are, some say, all we have. We do things ‘for the story’, ‘for the memoirs’ and we want to lean on happy moments, within our darkest. We need to know that they were there, that sunshine exists. 

But I think that our obsession with memories can be damaging. Both in how we process our grief, but also in how we choose to conduct our lives. When we can’t find the sunshine, we can trick ourselves into thinking it was never there. When we chase it too much, looking for pure golden moments, we can burn ourselves. 

My brain feels fuzzy, post-virus, it darts from one thought to the next. Perhaps now is not a good time to collate my theories, to try and shape them into something beautiful. Something solid, that makes sense. 

But I’m going to try. 

I find memoirs strange. They’re always so crystal-clear with the facts. They paint a picture of a scene. They need to for the word count. But also to keep you gripped. If I were to start my memoir right at the very beginning, with that crayon, that balloon, I’d have to pad it out. In fact, I already have. I don’t know if the chair I sat on was wooden. I added that, to help you, the reader, picture it more. Place yourself within my story. Memoirs have to be part truth, part fiction. Unless everyone else is living their life like a storybook. Are your memories scenes that you can step into? Can you recall each sight, smell and taste? 

There are so many things I can remember. There are so many things I can’t. 

Last night, sweaty and sick in crumpled sheets, I began to pull at my memories. I found, like a magician pulling silk scarves from his sleeve, the more I tugged, the more came. But what arrived was unexpected: this unspooling of colourful moments, each one a surprise. 

I’m sitting on grass. The only detail I can tell you is that the grass was green. You knew that, already, it’s a silly detail to add. I can’t stand up and I’m laughing. My feet feel numb and floppy and I should be afraid but I am not. The boy I am with tells me it’s pins and needles, I have never experienced them before. He helps me to my feet. 

The floor below me feels cold. I am in an a Grecian dress, it flows, black pleats down to my knees. Gold threads tie at its waist. Across the room I see that boy, again. He raises one eyebrow at me. My mum’s laughing in a wheelchair, her face shiny and plump from steroids. Everything in my life is unsteady. And he’s back within it. 

I’m at a bus stop. It’s raining. It’s so loud and it’s battering the roof of the shelter. I can’t hear what they are saying. But there’s a couple, two people I do not know, will never know, and they’re screaming at each other. I’m young, just on the cusp of understanding, but I’m scared. Scared of how much hurt we can inflict in love. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to throw myself in. 

We are under orange street lights. We are salty with sweat. Night busses thunder past, the bass from the night has entered us, it reverberates through my veins. He holds my head, kisses my hair. I’ve thrown myself in. It’s worth it. 

Why do some memories remain? Why do others disappear? 

Our brains “prioritises memories that are going to be useful for future decisions.” So, the pins and needles, that’s easy: it wants me to remember this odd sensation is a safe one.

The fight at the bus stop is trickier. Why would I, for over twenty years, carry the memory of strangers fighting? A warning of some kind. Or perhaps just a reminder of reality.

The second bus stop, when I was dizzy in love, that remains because I am still dizzy in love. But perhaps in a more solid way. We were high twenty-somethings, dating and unable to afford anything but the bus home. Today we are married, with savings and the ability to afford Ubers that I fall asleep in. I still don’t feel old but, I guess, it’s nice to be reminded of when we were young. Or… it could simply be science. Oxytocin, the love hormone, has been found to strengthen memories. 

As for that party? That dress? I can remember the dress as there are photographs of me in it. It was the party my friend came back into my life. It was also, in some ways, a living funeral for my mum. A chance for her to celebrate a book she had written, a chance for us to celebrate her. Everyone knew she was dying. She knew she was dying. And still… she laughed. I can’t remember much of her, there. Is that because she’s gone? My brain thinks she’s not worth clinging onto? That she is no longer useful for future decisions? Perhaps my friend's presence is easier for me to access. My neurons are trying to be kind.

This is why I don’t like the endless trawling through our memories. Our reliance on them to tell us what our life consisted of. As I could spend hours reading scientific studies, or interviews with psychologists, and still, still be unable to control what stays and what fades away. When I interviewed Mary-Frances O Connor she told me that we think our brain is like a library, something we can wander into, extract a memory from the shelf, consume and place back again. But that’s not how it works. At all. 

I was asking her this as, for a very long time, I could not remember any happy memories of my mum at all. This consumed me. I felt as if I was betraying her by only being able to picture her wired up and unconscious in a hospice bed. But, this memory will remain because it was so unusual, so painful. Pain, it seems, can serve as either superglue, welding our most traumatic moments to us. Or, it works as an eraser. Wiping things clean away. 

But mostly, the things we don’t remember are the mundane. The day-to-day. It’s why we can’t recall if we’ve taken our medication, or turned our hair straighteners off. But it’s also why I can’t remember the joy of my mum, the joy of my grandma. With them, most of the time, it was a steady day-to-day dripping of contentment. Sitting at my grandma’s table, Countdown on. Curled up in bed with my mum, squished against her cashmere coated chest. 

My happiest moments now are often found within the ordinary. I love wandering the aisles of Lidl with my husband, placing nets of tomatoes in our basket; popping out for a lunch with my colleagues, into the hubbub of Leicester Square; sitting in sticky pubs, ice melting into our drinks, chattering away with my best friends. 

So why then, do I find myself chasing the BIG? The stand-out memories? The ones FOR MY MEMOIRS? Why, sometimes, when reflecting on my life, do I panic I haven’t collected enough of these, that I need more, more, more?

I don’t have a solid answer. I know that companies capitalise on our need to capture memories, urging us to spend our cash to create them. But I also know I don’t want to live my life within the supermarket, that with every new experience I seek, both good and bad, I learn something that drives me further forward. That pushes me further into this life of mine. 

You see how I trip and tumble over myself? How I both love and hate something all at once? I guess what I’m trying to say is… there are many things we can use as weapons against ourselves. Memories are just one of them.

The most obvious way is the torture of replaying mistakes, decisions that are impossible to alter. But we can also damage ourselves by placing too much value on their very creation, bruising ourselves with expectation, chastising ourselves when things don’t look - or feel - how we expect them to.

And when it comes to what we’ve lost, who we’ve lost, just like how our lives with them couldn’t be controlled, our memories can’t either. We aren’t a library to be curated, or a book waiting to be written.

We’re just moving along, collecting and losing moments along the way. Mostly, we just keep going.

Right, I’ve started sneezing so much it’s like I’m doing sit-ups. I have a feeling this topic of memories and how the messaging surrounding them can help/hinder us will be one I’ll revisit a lot. So please do let me know your thoughts.

I’m also going to include this paragraph from poet Maggie Smith’s memoir as I like it and it encapsulates some, not all, of the many things I think about memory but also how I think about writing about life. I write a lot about my own life on this newsletter, which can be tricky, and she encapsulates that so well here… 

This isn’t a tell-all. A tell-all would need an omniscient narrator - godlike, hovering over the whole scene, seeing into the houses, listening to the conversations and phone calls, reading the texts and emails. I’m jealous of this all-knowing narrator, even though she doesn’t exist. I want to know what she knows. 

This isn’t a tell-all because “all” is something we can’t access. We don’t get “all.” “Some,” yes. “Most,” if we’re lucky. “All,” no. There’s no such thing as a tell-all, only a tell-some - a tell-most, maybe. This is a tell-mine, and the mine keeps changing, because I keep changing. The mine is slippery like that. 

This isn’t a tell-all because some of what I’m telling you is what I don’t know. I’m offering the absences, too - the spaces I know aren’t empty, but I can’t see what’s inside them. Like the white spaces between stanzas in a poem: what is unspoken, unwritten there? How do we read those silences?