half-thought-out rambling on memory

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

I realized, the other day, that I basically don't remember my childhood. My understanding of who I was as a child and how it has shaped who I am today is almost entirely intellectual, from the stories told me and the reading I have done (my family documents like you wouldn't believe). There are some snapshots — squinting to see the clock when signing in to my elementary school, watching the girls in my class play some complex patty-cake, asking permission to leave the cafeteria during lunch, biting through gummy worms at the exact mid-way point — but mostly when I think back to being young, I get a wash of pain and fear and my mind skitters along the surface, never breaking through. And I am okay with that.

Because I know that a good portion of the things I have forgotten are not forgotten; they are repressed. I have deliberately walked away from my memories; my brain has decided that here be dragons. Safer not to go there. Better not to go there.

Some things shouldn't be carried with you. If I need to go digging through all that stuff, it is still there; there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. But I don't think I need to be the one to bear everything. We can't carry everything with us all at once.

Here be dragons.

oh, and also, in happier news

While November and December are probably never going to be easy for me, doubling my lexapro dose on November 1 and keeping it at 20 mg until March made it easier. *clutches drugs to bosoms*