Blissful Forgetfulness

Blissful Forgetfulness

Stacy Shang

So much of my trauma I've simply forgotten. If I concentrate really hard and try to sift through the endless filing cabinets of experiences and negative thoughts, perhaps I'll find the memory, the one thing that illuminates the ways I react to things and feelings I have. Yet most of the time, it'll just be loud noises or a particular smell or someone touching my back at a particular place. But a lot of it is just confusion. If I don't go searching, I never find the answer that I'm looking for. Never find the source of these reactions. I used to have such a good memory, but now all I do is forget.

My mental health has greatly improved, but a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that I literally cannot remember. It's manifested itself in various ways such as constantly misplacing my phone, misremembering what plans I made, keeping organized lists but forgetting where I stored them, and constantly changing my opinions or thoughts on people and things. Even as I write this essay, I need to go back and double-check what I've already written, or I'll write down the same idea twice. The same goes for those memories I was searching for and the negative thoughts I had. How can I be depressed if I don't remember what happened?

I think I've told this story so many times, but then again I don't know for sure if I did. I think I went through a lot, but a lot of it is locked behind doors that I can't pry open. Or did I use a filing cabinet as imagery? I can't remember. It's like if I were to go searching for something at the bottom of a pool, swimming deeper and deeper, feeling the pressure building at my temples and collapsing my lungs, constantly reaching for something that's so blurry I can barely make out the shape of. And yet just before grasping it, I'm forced to resurface because the thought of remembering is terrifying, and I can't breathe anymore.

A lot of my memories are disjointed flashes of things that I think happened with huge black holes between them. I can tell you from abstract what happened. A therapist once told me that I recite my trauma like I'm reading from a history book. I don't think I stuck with her for very long after that. I constantly am just moving forward without looking back nowadays. But even if I were to look back, it's a flip of a coin if I were to actually remember.

I'll recite some of my trauma here now. I remember referring to it as a soap opera. Funnily enough, I wrote a lot of this down somewhere, but if you ask me where, I don't think I'll remember. Maybe buried in a notebook or in Apple notes or a text file or Google doc on some long-forgotten Gmail account or computer somewhere. Similar to how my camera roll from September 2019-January 2020 got wiped from not backing up my phone, or was it 2018-2019? I can't remember, and there are holes. Did I say that already? Like holes in a shirt that have been ripped open, but you don't notice them until the wind blows. Or did I say black holes? What was I doing again? Oh right, my experience.

It seems so silly really to still call things from high school traumatic, but truly it could be the script to a soap opera. Each time you think "surely it can't get worse than this," it does. But truly, I don't remember how I felt or what I did. I just remember them like I had written down these as bullets in a journal or sticky note and forgot about them.

Anyways, when I was in high school, I was in a relationship with a guy, let's call him Richard since he was kind of a dick. But really, it wasn't his fault. His mom was abusive and would beat him, and his brother would beat him too since they had a rough home life. I don't remember why they would beat him if I'll be honest—is that shitty of me? He would act out in school and the teachers didn't know any better, so they'd belittle him right back. The only nice one in his family was his dad, who was also kind of an alcoholic I think. He at least was on his side and would protect him.

I also had a best friend at the time, let's call her...Cat since I’ll be on the nose for simplicity in reference to her catty behavior. She was very manipulative, but ironically, now, she's studying psychology in college, so maybe she can go manipulate some more people. Back then, she would always tell me about how she was my best friend but sure didn't act like it. She would make comments about my appearance, talk about how shitty my skin was, talk about my weight, which led me to pick at my skin and pick at my body and basically hate myself. She probably couldn't help it though, she was overweight and unhappy, so I guess I was just her punching bag. She's still kind of a bitch though. I developed really bad relationships with friends and didn't know anything about what healthy friendships were supposed to be since she would get jealous if I got close to anyone else.

I also had a toxic ex-boyfriend who had been a part of our friend group who we'll call Richard because he was a—oh wait, I already said that. Um, let's call him Donkey since he was an asshole. He would belittle me and probably be a little more physically aggressive than I would like. To be honest, I don't really remember, I willfully blocked a lot of that out. I was in that friend group for a few years, but after Donkey dumped me, I got kicked out. Cat would stay in that friend group but still insist she was my best friend.

A year later, I dated Richard; of course, I was like his mom since his actual one hated him and told him every day he should have been aborted. The day before I was supposed to leave to go to China for vacation, his dad drops dead. He got a heart attack and just died. Then I had to be 13 hours of a time difference away, helping this poor kid through his dad dying. While that's happening, Cat messages me that Donkey reached out to her and wanted to date her, and I told her no, so she then sent photos of her self-harm. Then once I came back to the US, Richard had to move to Hawaii since his mom was in a legal battle with her deceased husband's family over the house, and she also did not enough income to support two high school boys since the dad was the main breadwinner, and of course, had no insurance, so they got nothing after he died. It was a legal mess, most of which I didn't understand and also blocked out. I don’t really know how I managed to survive that year, but once again, I’d forgotten a lot of it until I went searching.

In college, I was also harassed by my current boyfriend's ex-roommate, though I won't go into details about that since I don't want to remember what happened. After that, I wanted to get some therapy treatment since, at that point, I could still, unfortunately, remember everything. I didn't have the support of my parents at that time about mental health. So I visited CAPS, then was able to get separate therapy support and figure out all the healthcare nonsense and learn about what copays and deductibles and in-network practices by myself since I was pretty sure that if I didn't get help, I would probably not be in good shape. I did all of that by myself when I was 19 and finally got better…sort of. I started realizing that once the traumatic events had subsided and I was left in the quiet, I didn't remember much anymore. I think there may have been some kind of moment where things got so bad, that all of a sudden it was like a thread snapped in my head and I didn't feel anything anymore. I didn't feel the pain or the depression because I simply didn't remember. I feel all the normal emotions of daily life, but creeping anxiety that threatens to take over and tell myself to just quit? Not really anymore. I think I just got pushed so far that my brain blocked it all out. 

Now I just simply go through the day-to-day motions of life without the existential burden and stress of depression looming over my shoulders. I wouldn't generally recommend being pushed so far that your brain just blocks it out and forces you to forget. But I also just live in blissful forgetfulness. It manifests itself as forgetting where my keys and my phone went, forgetting what stories I've told, forgetting what I wrote earlier in the essay... wait, did I mention that already?