Side Effects May Include...

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya

Memory is unreliable, my memory particularly so. You can ask others seemingly simple questions like “what happened this week?” and they will give you a summation of notable events from the past seven days. But I can’t do that anymore.

My memory is now poor. It has been damaged by years of working as a therapist. I’ve trained my mind to forget all I’ve heard, or put another way- to remember details no longer than is absolutely necessary. 

Turns out professional listening can be harmful to your memory health. Imagine listening to the darkest parts of people’s lives for thousands of hours. No one can hold all that pain in one tiny brain, so you regularly empty the bin. For a counselor this is mostly a good and necessary practice. But sometimes other stuff gets thrown away along with the mental rubbish: items on the to-do list, significant events in the lives of friends, important upcoming events, etc. Perhaps I’ve become a little too good at forgetting?

I’ve also spent countless hours honing my storytelling ability, which also carries a high risk of damaging side-effects. You listen and observe with the goal of telling what happened in an entertaining way.

Yet, slowly but surely your objectivity weakens and dissipates. And as the ability to creatively narrate increases so does the penchant for distortion. For, what some slanderously refer to as “twisting the facts”, “exaggeration”, or so-called “lies and fabrications”, I call quality storytelling. This downward pull towards increasing subjectivity takes time, practice, and discipline, but telling a compelling narrative will always involve degrees of distortion, because, truth be told, reality is poor entertainment.

So I’ve learned to recognize the choicest morsels of a situation, along with those parts which are fat and gristle to be cut away.

That’s not necessarily a good thing. For example, say “what happened” was, in total, four hours long. No one wants to hear about the monotonous three and half hours that happened before “the good part”. So we contract time, and move things around. We generate connections between events that may or may not exist in order to make a story more cohesive. We iron out all the unwieldy details so that it will follow a logical arc. This is how we talk about “what happened this week”. 

You decide, would you rather hear the facts or a story? A dull recounting of reality, like a court clerk reading back the transcript, or a quippy, coherent viewing of the highlight reel?

I probably can give you only one, for my mind is not the black box of downed aircraft. My memory is shot- there’s a fairly high chance I’ve already forgotten what really happened. And from the remaining debris and fiery wreckage I’ll put the pieces back together trying to reconstruct what went down. It’ll all be glued together with omissions and exaggerations so the parts will fit. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but unfortunately professional listening and well-practiced storytelling are powerful agents and the side effects may include severe forgetting, mild to moderate distorting, and a general tendency towards subjectivity.