I Can't Remember Anything

While talking with my therapist recently about something in my past, I came to a conclusion: I don’t know if I’m remembering anything “correctly.” I kept saying, “This is my recollection of the events. I’m not sure if it’s correct.”

It’s important to me that you understand why I’ve put emphasis on “correctly.” Because without that, these remarks are bupkis.

I can remember dates, family dinners, birthdays, and conversations. I can recall specific details, more so than anyone else in my family..

Yet I am constantly fighting with my family about how I remember something.

It doesn’t matter which memory. It is all of them. Someone will always tell me I’ve remembered something wrong:

- A person’s name.

- A date.

- A quote.

- Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

It’s annoying, and it’s frustrating because I feel I can’t trust my own memories. Have I warped the way I share my memories to repress certain details, like Horace Slughorn in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? Have I committed one of Daniel Schacter’s memory sins?

At least, I don’t think so. And even if I am, I am not purposefully trying to misconstrue events. All I am trying to do is tell a story to my family.

At the same time, the constant corrections hurt. I’ve reached an impasse. So, what do I do? Not tell stories? History is filled with great epics orally told from memory over generations, forming part of a collective memory for a particular group of people. Homer told the great tales of the Battle of Troy and the war hero Odysseus orally from memory. The same for the Old English epic Beowulf. While certain aspects of those tales have been lost to the memories of those who passed the story on, it lived on — as imperfect as it was.

If these great stories were imperfectly passed on orally, i should feel confident in my own imperfect menories?

Right? By their very nature, memories are imperfect.

So, why does it still hurt when others correct my memories?

Is it because memories only live on when a group of people have them collectively and continue the cultural, societal traditions.


But all memories, even collective ones, eventually fade away. Someone along the way stops sharing it. Although it can be preserved in a computer memory bank, the human element, the creative, vanishes into oblivion. And collective memories also have their own biases.

In the end, I’m not sure. All I know is, I can’t trust my memory, and I don’t know what to do.