cause & effect

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?” 

Anne Carson, from The Glass Essay

For those who know the details of my childhood, I am sometimes asked why it is that I continue carrying my past with me day by day. For a while, I have wondered it myself. I eventually realized, however, that the answer isn't quite as simple as most would hope it to be.

It isn't simply a matter of choosing to put things away or trying to forget and move on; that part is easy. It's easy because I have done this most of my life.  Repressing isn't the same as recovering.  Repressing is a form of neglect (a form of ignorance); ignoring that something significant has happened that ought to be addressed. Recovering, on the other hand is giving due acknowledgement to past events and reforming the way in which our minds behave in response to events in the present, that parallel with the past.

People who have experienced some form of habitual trauma or neglect in the past may choose to forget for the time being, but it will always be nothing more than a temporary solution. Forgetting does not teach us how to live in a world where every word spoken to us and every touch against our skin feels as though a thousand thorns have pierced through our flesh. Forgetting does not explain why we still continue feeling pain in our hearts, why we continue having nightmares and waking in cold sweats nearly every night, and why we cannot rid ourselves of this inexplicable sense of fear every waking moment of our lives.

Perhaps most disheartening of all, forgetting will not teach us to trust those who claim to love us because those who were supposed to "love" us--our parents and guardians--betrayed us when trust was all a child could do.  It will not explain why we cannot trust others no matter how hard it is we go through the motions of reciprocating the tenderness given by our friends and lovers.

At this moment I am twenty-six. I wonder, how many years will it require of me to undo those twenty years of being habitually lied to, abandoned, used, and derided? In fact there is no answer to this question, for the past cannot be "undone." If that were so, simply forgetting would be enough.