Inside Out

Maybe we are not who we think we are: is there ever a perfect intersection of our perception of ourselves and others' of us?

Last week Shelley and I talked about how we construct memories. She told me about a theory positing that a memory exists perfectly intact until we recall it. Then, every time we pull that memory from the file of our minds, we mar it a bit in the way we latch on to bits and pieces, filing it back just a bit warped. The more we take it out of the file and examine it, the more we rewrite it. The memories we feel most certain about, the ones we cling fastest to, we're actually the farthest removed from factually.

This morning's fog lay over the pavement opaquely greenish-grey. I wondered how each of us identified ourselves; how far removed we each are from the way we are perceived. Which of the very experiences that have defined us have been completely erased from public perception? All the little pieces that each of us feel are crucial to anyone "truly understanding us" which make us feel isolated because no one recognizes. The dark pits of the nerve centers that no longer move into our behavior yet gently pulse in the pools of our eyes. The things I know you think about you. You still think: I am a junkie. I am his girlfriend. I am a bastard. I am crazy. I am a drunk. I will never graduate. I am white trash. I am the fat girl. I am the faggot out-cast. I am the sinner.

I remember the first moment when I realized my outsides had far outrun my past and my insides. I was 20. I'd just moved to Portland. I worked at Restoration Hardware. On a break, I lit a cigarette, and one of my coworkers said "Oh my god, you so don't seem like a smoker." "What?" "You're so, good," she said. This seemed hilarious to me. I'd left California, in part, to clean up. I'd been prescribed Neorontin to make me nauseous any time I drank before I left. Done enough drugs that I didn't ask when I was offered. Just left the man I lived with after my mother had called the cops from Washington because he wouldn't let me leave the house. Spent months taking handfuls of prescription pills so I could tolerate night long shouting matches. But, to anyone who couldn't see my past, I seemed like the "good girl" type.

How and why do we remember what we remember? What are we facilitating? Are we? Are memories like pictures, or are they more like the pictures we wish we'd taken, but didn't?

Who are you today?