Hi, I'm Sam,
Sometimes I don't know if I should be happy or sad that I somehow suppress emotions and memories. It's good when there are things I do not wish to remember and I don't have to lie or fight so hard not to remember them but it's sad in the sense that I've not really experienced any deep trauma that would warrant memory suppression but somehow my mind seems to think that no matter how I wish to describe those things as little, it will do me a favor by making sure I do not remember them. While we're here, I might as well blame my inability to remember names or people's faces on my mind choosing to suppress things and make them difficult to be remembered without any concrete memory attached to it.
There are things that I do not remember and when I am forced to remember them in any way, I just wish those things will remain in the past. I do not want them to remain in the past because they're too painful in the past and in the present but honestly because I have no use for them in the present and they really do not fit into anything happening in the present. I already know that these things are not strong enough to disrupt my life in the present or even if they try, I won't let them but still I want them to remain buried and forgotten where they are. They have done their job to either consciously or unconsciously affect how I live my life and make decisions, hopefully in a good way so there's really no point in coming back to the present that they have influenced in some way.
I had an incident with someone in the past and as much as the incident didn't go as far or as bad as it could've gone, my memory of the incident stopped half way and I have told the story multiple times years after it happened and the memory of it still somehow didn't get past half way. I honestly didn't feel like anything was missing in my recollection of the incident and it wasn't really something anyone who heard it could ask so many follow up questions because those follow up questions could easily come off as insensitive and because of that, every version of the incident I shared all had the same ending. A few weeks ago, it was jarring to find out that the story didn't end where I thought it did, someone who was part of the incident tried and succeeded to remind me that it went further than my mind remembered and I didn't know how to feel about the whole thing.
I've always known that I subconsciously suppress memories and I felt betrayed by mind in that moment because I only wondered what decisions I would've made different if I remembered everything in it's entirety. Suddenly i felt like I was owed an apology by the people involved in the incident but I didn't really know what the apology was for. I wanted to request for the apology but I was wondering how I was going to ask for it and what would happened if I was denied the apology. To crown the whole confusion, I still cannot remember the name or face of the person I felt owed me an apology, so where was I going to start. At this point, I feel like I need to straighten some things with myself and my mind before I can get any other person involved in whatever I am feeling. If I cannot fix my side, how will na apology from someone I don't remember, name or face, help fix my side when I am no longer a hundred percent sure that my version of the incident is accurate.
I had to let the whole thing go, because there is really no point letting something that happened years ago that I cannot remember completely disrupt my present no matter how little. If I'm to speak plainly, I only get upset when I remember the incident not because of how bad it was but how bad it has gone for others who have been in similar situation. Now I'm trying to be upset for them while trying not to talk about my incident because it's somehow like a cake walk compared to what people have gone through. Sometimes when I think like this, I feel like I am single-handedly trying to invalidate my feelings and situations just because it's not as bad as other people's situation.
I have come to realize that I can be relieved that my situation didn't get as bad as it had the potential to but I can still genuinely feel for those who had a more terrible experience without feeling better or smarter than or invalidating my own experiences. Our experiences are woven deep into the fiber of our lives that makes it different, unique, and special in our different ways. Our response to different scenarios, no matter how "similar" they may be will always be different and unique to us in different ways according to our experiences and exposure, still proving that we are different, unique but same humanly beings that we all are.
