I just now1 decided that a useful exercise is to close your eyes and try to inhabit your past self. Not just the broad strokes, the rose-tinted or trauma-tinged past, but the details we pass over in memory, too.
I remember those cab rides back home in Mexico City when I was seventeen, window cracked down, air rushing in, no phone in hand to distract mefrom the cinematic feel of the music, some feeling or another soaring within me. Elation at a night well spent, raging disappointment that a crush had not progressed to some next, holy, unattainable stage Iwould not have known what to do with if I’d reached it. That golden, effervescent longing for the world, that ever-threatening gray cloud talent for self-pity and wallowing. What did I think, then, of those nights? Did I feel they would never end? Did I need them to end? Long for them to continue on and on?
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
-Joan Didion
I remember, too, laying on my friend’s floor during a sleepover. The urge to keep giggling about whatever bullshit we were giggling about, but also a deep desire for silence. Not just out of tiredness, but because I so desperately wanted my friend’s cat to approach. I remember once laying uncomfortably on my belly for hours on the carpet, sleeping bag tossed over me, unwilling to move for fear that my motion would scare the cat away after it had finally deemed me worthy as a mattress, my secret goal for almost all of my sleepovers with this friend. maps
We often remember the past in the inital feeling that it conjures. The yearning of young adulthood. The nostalgia of childhood. The wild freedom of our collegiate days. An image flashing in our brains, a swirl of emotions, a detail that stands out. But we dismiss our ability to reach deeper, to inhabit our previous selves.
When I was a basketball coach, I learned to share this one exercise with my players. I’d have them stand in a line, then reach up as high as they could go. All of them, in keeping with what the coaching book I read had predicted, kept their feet on the ground as they extended an arm up. Okay, now reach a little higher than that, I’d say. Same instructions, but the prompt made them think about what muscles they hadn’t yet employed. They rose up on their tip toes, they extended the shoulder a little more. Okay, now reach a little higher than that. They gained another half inch, maybe more.
While it’s true that some of the past is lost to time, forever misplaced in the convoluted and enigmatic self-erasing folds of memory, we do have the ability to reach a little further.
And here lies the doubled-up comfort in the exercise: the realization at how much, too, we have forgotten. For one, there’s the ability to disappear in the past in a way that we did not think ourselves capable. We can escape, for however long we can stay focused on the memory, whatever is troubling us right now. We read books and watch movies for the escapism, and stepping into our past selves is not unlike re-reading a faovrite book, or re-watching a movie we grew up with. The other comfort in the exercise is the realization that the idea of a rose-colored past exists because joy outlasts trauma. That’s a reductive way to put it, I know. But! The pains and despairs, the wider world, and whatever was going within it that was causing us grief, those get softened by time. We might be able to reach and arrive at an approximation of those feelings, but they’re ghosts. The good and the bad.
And one day this will go that way too.
One day, most of this will have been forgotten. It will have passed. Who knows what surrounds that future. It might very well be worse than this. But all of that has not yet been written, could be altered, is unknowable and therefore could be very different from what we imagine. It’s for us to worry about later.
All this to say that, in these terrifying times of fascist hordes disappearing neighbors, tear gas in my neighborhood, at a grocery store I shop at, in these times of endless videos of masked cowards tearing families apart, endless images of dead and starving children at the hands of governments who somehow believe this is the right thing to do, meatheads on social media asserting confidently that tragedy should befall others because of the geographic coordinates of their birth, in these times where wealth seeks to consolidate itself against all reason and godamn humanity, in the face of all of this, and the myriad small actions we can take to fight the horrors, the acts still in our power to push back against these horrors, acts we should absolutely be undertaking, learning about, encouraging others to undertake, as we scream at the top of our lungs to just for the love of god make this planet as good as it could be if only people could find it in themselves to not be raging dicks, all of this to say…
We might need the occasional escape. A screenless, content-less (but content) escape into our own minds. Into who we used to be. The joys we’ve hung onto, the traumas we’ve escaped. Let us reach a little further into ourselves.
A month and a half ago when I originally intended to finish and publish this piece.
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