February 22, 2024

Hello friends,

I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately and how it shapes how we perceive time.

Between COVID in general and my own depression in particular, there are huge chunks of my life where I feel like my memory is super hazy or nonexistent. I’ve noticed that as I write more, especially prompts that directly address memory, I feel like more memories come back to me.

Several of my friends are working on memoir projects right now. Between those projects and my own creative writing and journaling, I’ve been wondering how much of the memories that seem to come back are genuine or inventions that fill in the gap. For rigorous research, the best way to verify that is probably to interview others who were present and see if their recollections match yours. Since my current writing is not meant to be memoir or particularly factual, I wonder how much this distinction actually matters.

I love to intellectualize my problems and emotions instead of actually feeling them and one of my favorite tactics is trying to determine where exactly feelings or behaviors come from in my deep history. If we are the collection of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, does it matter if those stories are factual or not? Of course there can be consequences and potentially conflict if your stories don’t align with those of others and in that regard it probably does matter. I think most of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves don’t actually impact people aside from ourselves.

This isn’t something I have any sort of conclusion on, but I do find it fascinating. Whether the memories are genuine or inventions, I’ve been really enjoying how at first accessing any recollections feels challenging, but the more I write personal history, the more memories seem to come back.

This prompt is one that triggers my memory. I wrote about the little playhouse that my dad built for us in my childhood home and the castle that he built out of cardboard boxes in our basement. Sometimes we would find candy in the castle mailbox.

Take 5-15 minutes and write about

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Your friend,
Laura