I Can't Remember Like You Can
"I can't remember like you can."
People hear that and smile politely, the way you do when someone says they're "bad with names". That isn't what I mean. I mean there's nothing in my head to go back to. There's no sepia-toned cutaway to a moment in 2009 where I'm wearing a questionable polo neck and playing vinyl on a woodgrain monstrosity.
I know facts about my life. I don't have scenes from it.
Growing Up
When you do something strange for long enough, you assume everyone else is doing the same thing and has politely agreed not to mention it.
I spent years being told off for "not remembering" and thought, well, fuck, my brain's lazy. That was a common theme, actually. My brain is lazy, as opposed to I'm lazy, because getting anything done has always meant fighting it.
So I built workarounds, and I didn't tell anyone, because I didn't know there was anything to tell.
<syn> I honestly couldn't tell you what colour anyone's eyes are
<syn> beyond knowing from memory my mum tells me hers are brown & my dad's blue
<syn> but that's from being told, not perception
It helps that I'm clever. I don't say that to be an insufferable prick, though I'm sure the talent is there. I'm abysmal at a great many "standard life skills", and being clever is a fact about me in the same way those are.
It's the kind of clever that papers over a crack by building a whole new structure on top of it, then gets confused when someone notices the scaffolding. The crack, in this case, was episodic memory, which I don't have at all.
How Recall Works For Me
This is the bit that unnerves people. When you ask me about something that happened, I'm working it out on the spot.
Most people reach back and retrieve a scene. I start from what I know to be true and what usually happens, and assemble a plausible version from that. It's Lego without the photo on the box; I've got a bucket of pieces and an excellent sense of physics.
Ask me about last week's meeting and I'll work out who was probably there, what they care about, how those meetings usually go, and where it was likely heading. What comes out sounds like recall, because it lands in the right place.
Ask me where I left my keys and I'll think about how I behave, how the room is laid out, and where keys tend to end up. Usually I find them.
It goes wrong when one of the facts I'm building from is wrong. The story still hangs together and still sounds convincing, but it didn't happen. I can't check it against a stored scene and think "hang on, that's not right", because there isn't one. All I can do is take better evidence from someone else and rebuild. I'm not lying to anyone when this happens, and I'm not lying to myself either.
<syn> episodic memory does not exist for me
<syn> there is memory there, but it's memory for facts
<syn> and those facts are then used to reconstruct a "memory" simulacrum
Most days, nobody notices. I've been doing this my whole life and I'm fast at it. I'm fairly sure nobody around me has ever thought about it.
When it goes wrong, though, it goes gloriously wrong. One bad assumption and I've "remembered" something that never happened, with total confidence. It's a cathedral built on a plate of jelly.
<mog> You remember stories though
<syn> I remember facts about stories
<syn> I can reconstruct the story
<syn> but good example
<mog> Huh
<syn> sometimes I veer off track
<syn> if i'm telling them around my mum she'll say "no, that's not what happened then"
<syn> the reconstruction is accurate until it reaches a faulty fact
<syn> if a base principle is faulty, stories are a perfect example, the story will veer off
<syn> it'll be plausible, but it won't be what happened
<syn> it'll illustrate the same point, but won't be the correct specific chain of events
So someone I trust says "that didn't happen", and I start asking questions to find the fact I got wrong. That gets read as me doubting them so often. The term "interrogate" has been used.
It's the opposite. I'm asking because I trust them. If they say one thing and my version says another, something in my version is wrong, and I want to find it. If I didn't trust them, I'd shrug and move on and we wouldn't be having the conversation.
Finding The Words
It took me 41 years to find out there's a name for this: Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). I'd assumed I was broken.
It tends to come with company, and I've got both of the usual suspects. I'm aphantasic and alexithymic, which are both excellent words.
Aphantasia
Aphantasia means you can't voluntarily picture things. When someone says "picture a beach", I know about sand and waves, but I'm not seeing anything.
I only found out other people could when someone mentioned counting sheep to fall asleep, and I realised they meant they could actually see the sheep. Everyone had a superpower and nobody had thought to mention it.
It was only named in 2015, and it affects roughly 2-5% of people.
Alexithymia
Alexithymia means you have trouble recognising and describing your own emotions. You know something is going on in there, but whether it's anger, sadness, hunger, or a difficult fart is anyone's guess. It tends to show up as a vague physical sensation, and when someone asks how I'm feeling, "bad" is often the best I can do.
It's surprisingly common, affecting about 10% of people, though they probably couldn't tell you how they feel about that statistic.
Feelings As Facts
For a lot of people, emotion is what holds a memory together. They remember how scared or happy or embarrassed they were, and the scene comes back with it. My emotions are muted and hard to name, and what I keep afterwards is a written-down version of what I felt.
So I can tell you I was terrified, but I can't feel that terror again. That's handy for getting through the day, and infuriating in therapy. It's hard to heal a wound you can't feel, even with a detailed description of it in hand.
<mog> How often can you identify how you feel? I think the veil got ripped off the painful side of your emotional landscape through the last three years of Dave's Medically Exotic Adventures
<mog> Be nice if you could also record joy to balance it out
<syn> I still don't feel traumatised by that and didn't at the time either
<syn> What I am willing to accept is that I WAS
<mog> ...you were literally screaming with terror
<syn> Yep, and I have a memory of a description of that, not the thing itself
<mog> Huh
<mog> I mean you realise that points to it very much being trauma
<mog> maybe your whole adolescent and adult life is. See. When hijacked by the amygdala one stops recording memory. If you're in fight or flight you're bypassing all the bits of the brain that make memory
<mog> So if you're in fight or flight every time you interact with people well
<mog> I dunno. You're interesting
Mog has a point. Spend years in low-level fight-or-flight and the amygdala takes over, and the hippocampus stops recording the rich, detailed memories everyone else gets. That doesn't make it a character flaw. It's what the brain does under that kind of pressure.
Getting By
None of this feels strange from the inside. The rebuilding happens automatically, and I only notice it when something I've built falls over. From the outside I look like everyone else. The cost shows up in social situations, because I'm working everything out as I go, and that's tiring.
Over the years I've settled on a few things that help.
- Write it down. Dates, decisions, what happened. A note written at the time beats anything I can rebuild later.
- Let the computer remember. A calendar that nags, and tools that leave a record behind them, so I'm not relying on my head for any of it.
- Keep a few people who'll correct me. A small circle who'll say "no, that bit's wrong", and who I trust enough to believe without sulking.
- Pin down the start and the end. I'm strict about where something starts and how it's meant to finish, and relaxed about everything in between. It keeps me mostly right.
When I say "my memory is bad", people think of keys and birthdays. What I mean is that I don't have the replay you have, and every time I remember something I'm making it up from parts. You can't fix it, but you can build around it.
There's an upside, too. The past doesn't replay on me, so it doesn't drag at me much, and I find it easy to change my mind when the facts change.
I've found a Facebook group for SDAM. If you think this sounds like you, maybe I'll see you there. There's also apparently a Reddit board, if terrible men are more your scene. Hey, I don't judge.
With thanks to Mog, who put up with me while I talked shit about the nonsense going on in my head, and provided some incredibly useful insights in response. The amygdala/hippocampus interaction was all them, as was pointing out that storing trauma as fact rather than feeling is itself a trauma response. I don't know what I'd do without them.