I envy those people who recount with clarity tales and funny moments from their past. I can’t, my past (anywhere from around 30 minutes ago to the point where I first sucked in a gulp of air) is a hazy blur of forgetfulness. Let’s get this cleared up first though, I had a good childhood, my mother is great and did an amazing job, my sister is great and her family is wonderful. I love them both dearly (although I don’t think I’ve ever verbalised that to them). I didn’t suffer any more than average as a kid due to bullying at school (although I was bullied), and while we weren’t rolling in cash my mother made an amazingly small amount of money go miles and we had enough.
So, I haven’t blocked out my childhood memories because they sucked, I just don’t really have a lot of memories, and the ones I do have are hazy and I’m really bad with dates and timelines.
I remember going and seeing the first Batman movie, but can’t remember when it was in the context of my life, for example. I think it’s because I don’t spend a lot of time trying to recount my past memories, these things get stronger if you remember them over and over. So perhaps if I sat down and wrote down memories they would lead onto other memories and more things would come back. Thinking about some things certainly causes them to behave that way. But anyway, in general, I don’t have a good recollection of my past.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I started writing a blog post about the Rocky Horror Picture Show and wanted to put a disclaimer saying my memory sucks, and wanted to be ‘clever’ and link to a post about how my memory sucked. So here it is. And this isn’t a plea for hugs, it’s just a statement of fact, which explains why some of my other posts and future posts have screwy time lines.
Self referential blogging at it’s best.
On my life to-do list is an action to write a journal of my life. Perhaps, I too am somewhat deluded about my own self-importance – but I figured it might be something that my grand-children would value long after I am gone.
So, about 3 years ago I was on a long train journey and I bought a brand new notebook and I started to outline my life journal. Just bullet points – I broke my life down into sections first – pre-school, primary school, secondary school, university, meeting Marie, first job, getting married, having kids, second job, moving to USA, coming back to UK, moving to Sweden, coming back to UK, next job, Boots, IBM etc.
What I found was as wrote the bullet points in each section it jogged a few other memories and so on.
I was surprised how many times on that 3 hour train journey something popped up that I had not thought about for 10, 20, 30 years.
The journal remains unwritten – although the notebook with the outline is right here in my desk drawer. Incomplete because of course in 3 hours I couldn’t get it all down on paper.