Due to my Aphantasia, I also have SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory), I never remember anything in the first person. This is why I keep a diary.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/07/13/2415-first-person-memory/
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First Person Memory
I’m cleaning out my inbox and come across a series of replies to a journaling by email service I once subscribed to.
Missives sent off the cuff, 172 in total. September 2016 to January 2019. Entries separate from my main, frankly sparsely populated, journal during this period.
It’s warm out. The full summer sun hit the bedroom window an hour ago. A bright beam tracking through half closed blinds across the carpet. I lay on the bed as I read, copy and pasting each reply one by one into Day One, the journaling app where the rest of my life resides. I’ve done this before, over several months, Jan through March 2023. I wonder if this is the last hidden cache. Extra proof of a lived life.
Over the next few hours, a life unfolds a few sentences at a time. Apple C, Apple V.
I hate my job. We are house hunting. We move. I lay on our old bed in the very same room complaining about a hangover. I place dates on friendships, the first time I met now close friends. Celebrate Birthdays. I go for dinner with friends years dead – only now do I realise that it was for the last time.
I have a mental breakdown. Quit a horrible job and the panic attacks start. We go on holiday, I get very lucky. Background anxiety. I love someone so very deeply.
Day One’s calendar view slowly fills empty months with blue squares. Little moments in my life recovered, fixed in place on a timeline by hour, day, month, and year.
I must admit, I barely recognise the person whose email archive I am excavating. They read like the words of a stranger. A low resolution image of someone I used to know. A life retrieved and reflected back via advanced search filters and Google Mail’s deep memory.
I suffer from, or better, experience SDAM. Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory – a condition related to my Aphantasia.
My memory isn’t like other people’s. I experience self as a series of linear events. I never remember anything in the first person. Like that time I got hit by a car and saw bright white tibia through gouged flesh. If I really try, perhaps somewhere there is the sound of push bike brakes. The sensation of head over handlebars. Bonnet metal engine hot. Adrenaline and shouting.
But there’s no event to re-experience like a movie. No first person memory. It’s just a thing that happened. A fact. Asking anything more is like trying to remember smoke, or catch a dream upon waking.
My capacity to learn and recall facts, figures, and dates is otherwise intact. I, more or less, function normally in my day-to-day. Though others I’m sure would say I have a terrible memory for certain things. I make sense of life in complete absence of recollection. A moving window of memory that travels with me as I grow older. A sense of self only relevant in the present and recent past. I have never had any idea of who I want to be.
A year out from my 40th I realise now that this is why I bought an Olympus OM10 with my 16th birthday money. I felt compelled to document my life. To fix light onto 35mm film and turn moments into memories.
I took my first digital photos with a NIKON Coolpix E3200 in the summer of 2003. The very same camera, so hot right now, with Zoomers wanting to escape the super saturated flatness of the 2020’s. Retro tech invoked to dislocate themselves from our high definition era. Instant nostalgia with added digital noise and low pixel density.
In 2006 I saved and saved for months for a Sony Ericsson W810i. A feature phone that had the best camera on the market at the time. Unlike many of my friends, I pulled the photos off my phone. I carried this grainy archive with me into the future. From USB key to external hard drive, from computer to computer.
During the pandemic lockdowns I uploaded them all to Google Photos. A great compiling. Just like the exercise of copy pasting my diary and journal entries into one central app. I dragged folders of decades old images into a browser window one at a time. Today I have an almost complete archive of every image I’ve ever taken, every diary entry I’ve ever written, every poem I’ve ever composed.
Somewhere amidst all this digital ephemera and cyber exhaust lies a life – mine.
It doesn’t tell a complete story, but it does allow me to reconstruct one. I’ve never understood the metaphor of a memory place. Mosaic suits me just fine. Each fragment meaningless up close, but finds form when seen from distance.
The exercise is complete now. The sun has gone behind the flats outside. A little more of my life, broken down and organised neatly by machines in the cloud. I toggle between apps, my journal starts in 2009 and my photos begin 2003.
Somewhere between these two dates a life began. A digital one.
One that can be searched, queried, organised and manipulated. An external memory of zeros and ones. An archive that makes my sense impression of times, places and people … solid.
A life I can only understand by accepting that part of me at some point, permanently, moved online.
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