Forgetful

Growing up isn’t the problem, Forgetting is.

• The Little Princess

Ever since I can remember, I forget easily. People, places, the details of moments, they leave me quickly. and for a long time I assumed this was just how I was built, that some people hold on to things and others don’t, and I happened to be one who doesn’t. I thought I was normal. it wasn’t until I started paying attention to the people around me, the way they recalled first meetings, the way they held onto the texture of old memories that I realized something was off. they weren’t exceptional. they were just ordinary. and I wasn’t.

The word I used for myself back in 2021 was absent minded. but that wasn’t accurate either. absent minded suggests distraction, a mind that wanders. what I had was something heavier, I was there, physically present, talking, hearing, reacting. but I wasn’t feeling anything that would last. the moment I turned away, it was gone. people I had spent real time with, conversations that mattered, the first time I met someone, wiped. not dimmed, not fuzzy. just gone. being present in body while something in you stays just slightly behind the glass, watching but not fully inhabiting the moment. I didn’t know this back then but only felt and and I kept losing things I was standing right next to.

What confused me most was the contradiction. I have never struggled with the kind of memory that matters for studying. I memorized long poetry, lengthy Quran chapters, precise academic material, sometimes whole papers. I could hold that without effort. so I wasn’t someone with a weak memory. I was someone with a selective one, and I didn’t understand the selection. it hurt my brain to think about it, so I stopped thinking about it. which, I would later realize, was exactly the pattern.

It is only recently that I understood why. I abandoned my past, not in one decision, but slowly, instinctively, the way you stop visiting corners of your mind until you forget they exist. I never went back. I never sat with the tension of what it felt like to be younger, to be that child, to be whoever I was before I became who I am now. and when something was genuinely hard to endure, my mind did what it had learned to do: it numbed it. erased it. moved on before I could feel it fully. what looked from the outside like resilience, letting go easily, not dwelling, moving forward, was something quieter and sadder on the inside. it was experiential avoidance at the level of memory itself. my brain didn’t just help me avoid the feeling. it helped me avoid the record.

I don’t know what it was like to be a child. not really. I don’t feel a pull toward that time, no nostalgia, no longing to return. and I’ve learned that this absence of longing isn’t peace, it’s distance. I left that part of myself behind so completely that I don’t feel the missing anymore. and that might be the saddest thing I’ve written down in a long time. not that I forgot. but that I forgot so thoroughly I stopped noticing I had.

I am good at letting go. good at moving on. good at forgetting. although people have thought that it was a strength . I’m not sure anymore what to call it. I’m not sure what remembering feels like.