The other day, I was talking to one of my friends and I asked him how old he was when his parents got married. He told me he couldn’t remember. When I broadened my question, asking if he was in elementary, middle or high school, he still couldn’t tell me. He had blocked out all memories from that time in his life.
I am often asked in writing classes to think back on scenes from my life. Exercises like these made me notice that I too had blocked out all memories from one time in my life.
My friends and I all have different reasons for why we choose not to remember parts of our lives, but in my case, it was because I hated who I was during middle school. I was a gossip, a wannabe cool girl, a tease. All things that are common for kids to experience during adolescence, yet still not things that I am proud of. Because I don’t want to remember who I was during that period of my life, I decided I wasn’t going to remember anything about that period of my life.
Yet, yesterday when I was having beers with my friends the topic of childhood memories was brought up again I really began to think about it. A flood of images and scenes came back to me. wearing a headband around my waist to hold up my pink cloth yoga pants, justice tank tops, my classmates pulling the “er” off of Mrs. Dicker’s nameplate, my obsession with Alexis Ren, being called out for my thinking face (which I used to call my potato face – basically I just squint a whole lot to the point where it looks like I’m smiling at you), putting goldfish in a water bottle, shaking it up and saying “the fish are swimming,” getting a detention for doing so.
& all of these cringy memories actually made me happy. Not because I enjoy them, but rather because I can look back and laugh at how much middle school sucked, and how happy I am that I’m no longer at that phase of my life.
When I blocked those awful memories out, I missed the gratification of knowing that I have grown. And that is enough for me to begin to remember again.
