I started writing this on 25 March 2007. I found it again recently, and it hit me hard as I was learning more about SDAM, or severely deficient autobiographical memory. Fifteen years ago, I described reading my memories like a newspaper report, feeling like I was intruding on someone else’s life.
Looking back, I can put my confusion and distress into some context. I was struggling to come to terms with my inability to relive my own memories. Here’s what I wrote.
I'm going to try to describe what it's like to live a life that's fractured and shattered into a hundred tiny pieces.
Imagine your life, not as one life but as many lives, seen through the eyes of many different dramatists. Imagine that each day, a die is cast. The plot, the setting, the motivation, the direction, the lighting, and the actor all change. Then imagine these scenes stitched together, like channel surfing through a hundred different variations of the same story.
You'll get the general drift of what’s happening. But events are seen from different perspectives. Time passes slowly sometimes, quickly at others, hanging motionless for an eternity before jumping to light speed.
Now, imagine you're not in the audience. Imagine you are the protagonist. This is your life story, a hundred tiny pieces, randomly chasing each other and never quite connecting.
A hundred tiny pieces.
Looking back over my life, as much as I am able, I see vast periods of time in which I have no sense of who I was. Those times of my life may as well be a story I was told. A story that happened to someone else entirely and not to me.
It gives me a strange view of time. I'm aware, in a sense, that yesterday happened and tomorrow will happen, but I feel no connection with either. I remember yesterday – I can recount parts of it in detail – but it's like reading a newspaper report. For the people who live with me through this, this is strange, and I try to shield them from my disconnection from their sense of time's passing.
I know if I read this tomorrow, I won't recognise the person who wrote this. By the time I re-read this, I won’t be able to imagine how those thoughts occupied my head.
I've been living this way for longer than I can remember. On one level, it's brought me immense benefits. An uncanny ability to understand someone else's experience, even as I struggle to understand my own. An ability, sometimes accidental, to see every side of every story. An ability to hold completely contradictory points of view and not be in the least disturbed.
Except sometimes, like today, I am disturbed. If only there were some way I could piece these parts of myself back together. But the puzzle is so complex.
And I don't know if I want anyone else to know about this. I'm scared that people will judge my fractured reality as madness. I'm scared that this day will vanish like all the rest, never to be revisited.
At the time I wrote this, my life was pushed and pulled in every direction by the substances I was consuming. I was barely holding myself together, exhausted by unacknowledged trauma, and battling to stay sane. In truth, I was unwell. And at times, like on the day I wrote this, I was uncertain even of the ground I was standing on.
I’m sharing this now in the hope that it might help someone else, especially if you’re struggling right now. I want to reassure you that you can live your life well, even on the days when it feels like it is slipping through your fingers.