Joan
Didion wrote in 1968 that, “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed
altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents,
children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” I am
one of those people. Over the years, I have had a compulsive need to log my
life in notebooks. I started early and along the way although I have lost some
of those records of memory and the therapeutic aspects of talking to oneself on
the page, I find some fragments live on in other people’s recollection of me.
Different times, different people, different memories…
Funnily,
when you are with people from different stages of your life, you recapture some
of your old spirit. Becoming for that period, the person you were. It has been
surprising to relearn about who I was in the eyes of others. Was I really that
person? If I was, where did I go? Who is this person I see in the mirror every
morning?
In
her book, “Time Warped,” Claudia Hammond speaks of the reminiscence bump, which
refers to the fact that we are most likely to vividly remember experiences we
had between the ages of 15 and 25, largely because of the novelty. This is the
period that records the largest number of firsts and ties into when we are
forming our unique identity.
I
met Shekhar during this period of my life. Our time together was full of firsts
and the memories are both strong and vivid but I am learning I have other
firsts, ones that came before Shekhar. The ones I recently
rediscovered…sublimated below the grime of years gone by. Made shiny and new by
friends, who I have not met for decades…our mutual absence from each other’s
lives making certain memories sharper and others fade into insignificance.
The
reminiscence bump has been known to recur for those who undergo major
transformations in identity later in life. It has taken me five years to reach
a point where I am willing to let go of the sadness, to look at not what was
taken away but what was given, to stand at the threshold of such a
transformation… I have and am accumulating many more firsts after Shekhar. As I
forge this new identity, part old self, part consolidation of who I was with
and because of him, part damaged, part regenerated…I cannot wait to meet the me
I am becoming.
***
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the
people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise
they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at
four a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed
them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought
we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what
we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
Joan
Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem
