Sifting through old photographs and paperwork in an attempt to tidy, retain or discard stuff that had been sitting unopened for far too long, I came upon certificates from my school and university days. Two years ago when I had made my annual visit to Delhi to see my dad, he’d given me two file folders stuffed with papers from my past. At the time I had skimmed through them quickly, promising myself that I would organise it all when I returned to the UK. Of course, that never happened because once back I was swallowed up by the minutiae of daily life and those folders sat unopened in a box in our coat closet.
Well, COVID-19 has had us trapped at home and revisiting the chores we’d been procrastinating on for far too long. Even as my husband worked his way through the mountains of paperwork he’d inherited from his parents, I sat next to him going through my own little pile.
Isn’t it funny how our minds are so very selective about the memories we decide to cling to, while others just seem to dissipate with time? Even the memories we do retain are often covered with a patina of our own choosing, time and history imbuing them with the simplicity or complexity that our minds bestow upon them.
This retention of the various certificates, newspaper articles, competitions I’d participated in, won or lost, had developed a distant sheen in my mind. I’d always known I loved writing, but seeing my name in a long-defunct newspaper supplement brought back just how much. Reading through those old stories that I had crafted made me blush at the awkwardness of the writing, the clumsiness of the plots, the gauche ineptitude of a writer still finding her feet. But they also ignited an awareness of the fearlessness that I had approached life with, the unshakeable belief that I could write and I would write. Life eroded that confidence and it is only thirty years later that I once again, tremulously, presented my work to the world.
If age gives us wisdom, then it takes away confidence. If youth gives us confidence, it doesn’t yet have all the years of experience to percolate into writing something valuable or worthwhile. But each step of the way, each stage of our lives make us who we are today. Our memories aren’t just chapters of a book long forgotten. They are a map to where life has led us and where we may find ourselves walking to next.
“Your memory is the glue that binds your life together; everything you are today is because of your amazing memory. You are a data collecting being, and your memory is where your life is lived.” – Kevin Horsley, Unlimited Memory
