I read a book not too long ago, called “Brain on Fire”. Wikipedia says:
The book narrates Cahalan’s issues with [a mysterious ailment] and the process by which she was diagnosed… She woke up in a hospital with no memory of the previous month’s events, during which time she had violent episodes and delusions.
The very first page of the book is an author’s note from Cahalan herself:
“…I remember only flashes of actual events…from the months in which this story takes place. The vast majority of that time remains blank or capriciously hazy. Because I am physically incapable of remembering that time, writing this book has been an exercise in my comprehending what was lost. …I’ve made use of the evidence available…to help me re-create this evasive past.”
When I read this, it struck home.
I have long struggled with fading or failing memory. My own history is a cobble of mental snapshots, instantiations I think of as “feelings-shapes”, family stories, and the like.
I can rarely give you a timeline of events, or a decent narrative of an event in my life.
I recognize many of the factors that affect memory for me, including ADHD. But my own memory, both short- and long-term, became so bad in the early 2020s that my teen daughter Emily became seriously worried, and asked me to see a doctor.
I went to see my physician and a neurologist. The physician tested me for dementia, which I do not have. The neurologist looked at an MRI, which showed spots that are markers for migraine sufferers – I have silent migraines – but nothing more.
Silent migraines are migraines without the characteristic throbbing headache. With a silent migraine, you experience aura, which are changes in your senses (sensory issues).
my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/silent-migraine
Also known as migraines without headache…silent migraines affect about 5% of people with migraines. Even though they don’t cause a debilitating headache, the condition can disrupt your daily life.
The physician didn’t really have anything helpful. The neurologist suggested my memory issues are normal for a woman of my age (I’m 47 at the time of this writing) and level of occupation (I am a perennially busy person).
Bullshit.
Other people my age and circumstances can REMEMBER things. They have better memories of their loved ones, holidays, of their children as babies and toddlers.
I have always – ALWAYS — wanted to write, but I have hangups about writing; I’m a closet perfectionist, it turns out, which makes me freeze up in fear.
So, this is my writing month. I thought I’d try to write the re-creation of my life, the semi-autobiography, that I’ve wanted to write for years.
Let’s begin.
On understanding context, culture
One cannot know and keep in mind every event, nor just every major event, nor just the top 20 events of each year in which they lived. There is simply too much.
But it seems important to review the facts as best we can. When did such-and-such a thing first become popular? What was the state of humanity, civil rights, law, history, science, at such-and-such time?
I have learned that, though we may feel otherwise for quite some time, a human does not grow and exist in a vacuum. We are born to a world in medias res, into an existence that has formed and changed and grown in infinite ways. We grow up in the melange of flavors of our own time and place.
Just as Shakespeare would set the stage before the players entered the stage, let us set the stage a little before Newborn Jen arrives.
1974, pre-me
It is 1974. Paul McCartney is at Abbey Road with Wings, filming One Hand Clapping. Little Jimmy Nelson is 4 ½ years old. I am not yet a plan in my parents’ heads.
- 8-tracks were still popular, but cassette tapes had overtaken them a few years prior.
- HIV/AIDS existed, but was not yet known or understood, even to those few who had it or had tried to treat it.
- Work had just begun on the 800 mile long Alaska Oil pipeline
I cannot know what it was like to live in this year, but I had the artifacts of the 70s in my house, the old fashions still hanging around. In my mind, this is a time of orange and burnt umber, James Taylor and Olivia Newton-John, clear skies, post-60s hairdos softening down into 70s waves and feathered hair.
It feels like the era of wire-rimmed glasses.
Notes: Politics, economics, war
- Nixon resigned, and Ford pardoned him. Ford also announced an amnesty program for Vietnam War deserters and draft evaders.
- The IRA were bombing Britain. Smallpox kills 10-20,000 people in India. Syria and Israel agree to a ceasefire. Argentina becomes the first country with a woman president.
- The Soviets revoked Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship. He was a Nobel Prize winner, an author and Soviet dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system.
- The global recession deepens, gas prices go up, and speed limits in the US are capped at 55mph.
- A 67-member tribe – the Kootenai Native American Tribe in Idaho – declared war on the United States as a final effort to gain attention to the tribe’s loss of land and subsequent troubles. It was a peaceful war of tolls and pamphlets, and lasted 29 days. The U.S. granted the tribe just over 12 acres to end the war.
Notes: People, society
- The world had about 4 billion humans. Millions of those suffer famine and drought in Africa.
- Ali took his title back from Foreman. Stephen King published his first novel.
Science
- The Soviet Union launched Salyut 4, their fourth space station.
- A scientist discovered Lucy in Ethiopia.
- India became the 6th country to successfully detonate a nuclear weapon.
This is part of the culture that existed before I did. I tend to think of the times and attitudes we’re born into – and raised in – as “the soup”.
Next time, perhaps, 1975 and 76, and the Council of Jens.