I have been thinking a lot about memory lately. I’ve been doing some personal archeology in my own past, both as a form of research for the new novel, and as a part of the ongoing inquiry into issues of personal identity and self-(re)construction. I’m constantly amazed at how little I remember of my own life (let alone what was going on around me on a community, national or global level). I feel like the memories I do have are the equivalent of a small shoebox full of faded, oddly-colored photos, snapshots from this moment or that, not necessarily connected to each other and often unlabeled. Sometimes the snapshots are moving, like the Harry Potter kind, but they only capture a small moment, never an entire story. I’ll remember, say, contentedly walking across the UCSC campus on a macadam path under the redwood trees, listening to a Cat Stevens’ Greatest Hits tape on my Walkman. (Oy, did I just massively date myself or what? No matter. Onward.) But I don’t remember what I was wearing, where I was going, what the weather was, what the smells were, or why that moment was important. I just remember it.

Some moments are more important, and they are seared in my memory, yet still only snapshots: sitting in the stall of the school’s bathroom in 7^th grade, fearing that the stain in my underwear meant I’d had some sort of incontinence but then in a thunderclap of understanding realizing that I’d just gotten my first period. Climbing up the dusty, switchback dirt path up Masada in Israel at dawn (and twisting my ankle and getting to ride the tram back down). My first “real” (albeit casual) kiss under the mistletoe hanging in the doorway of our Drama classroom in high school. The moment the ground heaved like the ocean and trees bowed like dancers while I was standing in the doorway of a classroom on the Kresge campus, during the Loma Prieta earthquake. Losing my virginity in the back of a Volvo station wagon, in the cast parking lot/campground of the Renaissance Faire. Sitting in the doctor’s office on my 23^rd birthday, being told that the bad news was, it was cancer; the good news was, if there was any kind of cancer to get, this was the best one (and my response: “well happy fucking birthday”). Sitting at my desk in the house I shared with a friend in Santa Barbara, pouring intense emotion into typing back and forth on computer chat with Josh and finally coming out with “I love you” and feeling drunk on exhilaration and fear as I hit send. Our wedding day. The loss of three potential children. The birthing of my two sons. The morning of 9/11. The moment when a secret was revealed that changed my marriage.

It’s not that I have *no* memories, it’s just that they’re, well, snapshots. They’re brief. They’re incomplete. I question whether I’m remembering the events themselves or just the stories I have been told/told myself over the years *about* those events. Some things I feel I should remember are completely gone. World events, cultural milestones, family experiences. Everyday details, places, people. What kind of time did my brother and I spend together in middle school? What did I eat for lunch in high school? What did the outside of my last apartment in Santa Cruz look like? What was the first date like with the boyfriend I met through a personal ad? I feel like there is so much that is just irrevocably gone. Friends often play the game of “do you remember so-and-so?” with me, and almost always, the answer is no. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate or connect with the people around me at the time, it’s just that if they’re not still around, and they aren’t associated with one of the snapshots from the shoebox (or one of the stories I’ve told about the snapshots in the shoebox), well, they vanish. It’s a good thing I still keep family and friends around me from all the stages of my life, or I’d be constantly adrift, wondering where I’d been (and who with).

In this day and age, we have a million easy ways to capture memory and save it up for later. Back then, it didn’t occur to me to document my life with any regularity or detail, nor did I think I’d need (let alone want) to have those memory aids someday. We have shifted, our culture, to a constant broadcasting of ourselves and our experiences, and we leave an easily searchable/recoverable trail behind ourselves of emails, photos, online journals, status updates, tweets, and check-ins. I have a much more complete and regular record of what I’ve been up to in the last 10+ years since email, digital photography/video, computer journaling, blogging, Facebook and Twitter came into my life, but even still, that’s not enough. I hardly ever review my past journals or letters or emails (or updates or tweets), and I have so many photos now that it’s nearly impossible to just browse through them (even the physical photo albums I happen to have, which are not many, I rarely look through). I know that I *could* go back and look for anything that’s in my digital archives though, and that sort of comforts me. But what about the older stuff, things from our early married life, from grad school, from college, from high school? In addition to my memory snapshots, I do have some physical souvenirs and ephemera from all those periods in my life. I have bunches of saved cards, letters, notes, journals, etc, perhaps because I have long labored under the illusion that some day an archeologist or historian or maybe at least my children would want to know more about my early days--but I never look at them (though the older and more forgetful I get the more attractive starting to go through all that old stuff seems to me). It seems an overwhelming job to examine it all in an effort to remember the details.

Part of me wonders if I need to, if this constant obsession with personal documentation that is part of the early 21^st century is a good thing, if it gets in the way of the “normal” human experience and memory. Maybe there’s very good reason why I only remember so many things, or why some things remain important to me while others have mostly or completely faded away. Yet part of me still grieves over the unrecoverable loss of so many potentially helpful (or at least potentially comforting) details of memory. Isn’t knowing who I was then an important prerequisite to figuring out who I am now, or who I may someday be? I think so, which is why this recent spate of personal archeology and archival research into my own past that I’ve undertaken seems more interesting and more urgent now. I know there are patterns to be teased out that I didn’t always see (or some that were always there that I’ve forgotten about until recently), and this is maybe what I’m hoping to find when I look back through my memories or life souvenirs: some new (or newly understood) arrangement of explanatory details to hang an identity story on. I know I can construct an identity story even without “proof”...but the “proof”--the ability to examine and analyze my own historical record and say “Aha! See, I was always that way”--seems awfully attractive right now. Maybe in future posts I’ll be better able to articulate why.