am i allowed to forget?

the art and artifice of remembering

there’s an episode in gilmore girls where rory asks lorelai to throw away her box of dean things. lorelai warns her against it, saying those could be things rory wants to look at in the future, much like lorelai still does. rory says no, lorelai hides it in a closet, for rory to discover a few episodes later—and for her to go through (as lorelai predicted).

image source: annotatedgilmoregirls.com

i’m a big believer in keepsakes. i hold on to a “school” folder that houses my favorite exams (this is disgusting nerd behavior), some of my favorite lit pieces from high school, old school planners, and finance handouts i slaved over for weeks. right beside it, i have a mini novel i wrote when i was ten (which will never see the light of day), old notebooks with my shitty physics poetry (this is so embarrassing), and even my watercolors when i got into brush typography in my senior year of high school.

i find it hard to throw things away. i have old vases from a brief ceramic-painting stint in the pandemic, a cast iron challenger pan i spent nearly three hundred dollars on, more yarn than anyone should need, and a stack of clothes i promised myself i’d upcycle… four years ago. there’s always this notion that maybe someday i’ll need these things—and while there are moments that prove this to be true, they come maybe once a year. which is typically enough to make me hold on to a boatload of things i will never need for another year. and so the cycle continues.

when i eventually move out of my parents’ house, this will probably be a problem, but i’m choosing not to think too much of it. i rationalize this by saying my grandpa still has 20-year-old paperbags from my favorite bookstore. these things become vintage and cool again, you know. (this is hoarder behavior, do not enable)

i know minimalism has erupted into this giant thing. tidying up, marie kondo style, as they say. “get rid of the things that do not spark joy.” —but what if it’s this “clutter” that sparks joy in me?

this practice of collecting has made its way to my phone, enabled by an expensive icloud plan that makes me think i need 20 photos of the same book. i can’t help it. late at night, i scroll through my phone, briefly terrified and amazed at the tiny squares that have made their home in my photos app. i go all the way back, gasp at how tiny my baby brother looked (and how he basically couldn’t speak properly at age 3), laugh at stupid videos i took of him during the pandemic, wonder why and how i’d ever need 50 photos of a sourdough i made in 2020, and marvel at the sheer amount of lives i’ve lived in the span of five years.

i can’t forget. to me, these things are all evidence of who i used to be, what it took to get there, and who i am now. every photo or video, failed knitting project, and ugly batch of cookies are markers for my life. it’s not that i’ve lived an extraordinary life—not any more than anyone else, that’s for certain—but it’s proof that i’ve lived. at one point in time, i took a picture, kept a story, or took a silly video—because it brought me joy—however fleeting, momentous, or ephemeral.

from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (ed. Karen V. Kukil)

i know the tortured poets department gets a lot of flack, but i maintain that the manuscript remains one of the best songs that taylor has ever written. specifically—these following lines—they continue to ring through my head at odd hours:

1. now and then she re-reads the manuscript of the entire torrid affair

2. and the years passed like scenes of a show / the professor said to write what you know / looking backwards might be the only way to move forward

3. and at last she knew what the agony had been for

4. the only thing that’s left is the manuscript / one last souvenir from my trip to your shores / now and then i re-read the manuscript / but the story isn’t mine anymore

“i am part of all that i have met,” sylvia plath writes in her journal. that’s what refusing to forget means, at least in the odd crook of my scatterbrain. who you are in the context of the present makes it impossible to forget. however you love now is an outflow of your past brushes with love; how you move through life is a collection of the bits and pieces you’ve picked up in the years you’ve existed.

at the same time, i find myself realizing that much as these pieces make up the composition of your self as it exists in the present, they aren’t necessarily yours—not really. what i mean here is that the moment may have belonged to you in one form or the other in the past, but they no longer belong to you in the same gravity they once did. maybe that’s why i put so much premium on remembering—it takes immense loss and grief to understand the weight of a fleeting happiness that no longer belongs to you. you close your eyes, claw through the shreds of memories, and beg, desperately, to be brought back.

in the same breath, the act of remembering also brings about a different kind of feeling—a certain grief perhaps, rage in some cases, and an overwhelming relief in being past pain.

in 2023, i remember detailing my own version of a torrid affair to a group of friends i hadn’t seen in a while. someone from that group told me something to the effect of, “i don’t think you’ve moved on at all. you’re still so fixated on the whole thing.”

it’s something i’ve torn apart, over and over, in the last two years.

was my rage proof i hadn’t moved on? was feeling a rage so deep proof i still hadn’t? was the existence of feeling mutually exclusive with moving past something? does refusing to make peace with all you’ve weathered equate to not moving on?

—and what, exactly, did it mean to really move on?

in stephanie foo’s what my bones know, she explains the concept of triggers as something our brain uses to signal danger.

from What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

i don’t mean to equate something as heavy as trauma to nostalgia, as the two have pretty pointed differences, but i feel it’s worth bringing up that the two coexist. i often wonder how much of my own fixation on remembering is because of my own traumatic experiences; the kinds that have left black holes in my mind. there’s been instances in the last two years where my parents or brothers will bring up a place or a trip and i’ll go, “what? when did we do that?” frustration will settle in, because no matter how many times they try to explain it (with accompanying pictures), i can’t remember it at all. it’s the idea that the people i love experienced a moment of shared joy—but my brain was too busy protecting me from all the perceived dangers i had allowed in my life that i couldn’t even remember what happened at all.

when i first read what my bones know in 2023, i read it not in the context of understanding myself fully. i think i feared what resonating with it would imply—if, perhaps, it was revealing of a truth i hadn’t even begun to admit to myself. it’s not to say i self-diagnosed, because i don’t believe in that, but rather, accepting that i was right to consider certain experiences of my life traumatizing.

it’s what makes sentimentalism so tricky—having to accept that your favorite set of memories often come with a dose of pain. in suleika jaouad’s between two kingdoms, she talks about marking her life in sections of before and after. it’s funny how you don’t really catch this kind of behavior until you find yourself doing it, too. more often than not, the way i mark certain eras in my life is with their painful counterparts. i know it sounds borderline masochistic, but i like to think it sets out a hopeful tone—this was me before that, and this is me now. i made it through, and i have the rest of my life to keep doing so.

this isn’t some kind of pseudo-inspirational thought rambling that tells you you’re going to forget all the painful stuff one day. the truth is, you’re probably never going to, or at least your body will never let you. i still can’t find it in me to get an ultrasound after a particularly rocky panic attack-inducing one in 2024. my heart still races and my entire body freezes when i drive past certain residential complexes in other cities. i have trouble with intimacy and allowing myself to be vulnerable with people. i avoid a lot of places. i have issues with trusting. i think it’s going to take a long time to get through those things.

why, then, do i keep remembering?

i think it’s a disservice to yourself if you forget; to go through an immense amount of pain and trauma and set it aside as if it never existed. they’re proof you’re no longer the same person, which is a good thing, because you’re supposed to change. not in big ways, but in the ways that matter to you. it’s okay to be sentimental, it’s okay to keep replaying things. looking backwards may be the only way to move forward. sometimes, dissecting who you’ve been allows you to understand why you are.

circling back to that same statement on whether or not i had actually moved on—i find myself thinking, no, it’s not mutually exclusive. i’m allowed to recount and retrace my steps and stumble when doing so. i’m allowed to feel angry on behalf of the girl who couldn’t find it in herself to leave. i’m allowed to recall the ways trauma ruined me and all the ways i went about to patch myself back up. i owe it to myself to remember how far i’ve come.

it’s thursday night and i am at an art event, momentarily distracted by an overwhelming selection of galleries. from the corner of my eye, i spy a relic of who i used to be, and briefly, my heart stops beating before it starts racing wildly in my ears. i think i am on the verge of a panic attack, i whisper in my head, before i remember where i am. i count five, four, three, two one, clutch my friend’s arm and tell her, let’s go to the other side.

i’m in the hallway and it happens again. this time my heart skips, but i don’t feel like the room is closing in on me. i hum motion sickness in my head and think to myself, yes, i am allowed to remember. i allow myself the grace to lay a flower on the grave—mine—before i leave.

i’m seated at a table an hour later, giggling over newness and old stories. i will remember this, i tell myself, because i can remember, but i can also overwrite.

it’s only human, after all.