I’ve written a small handful of journal entries to this website so far, about one a month. That schedule isn’t really a goal or anything, it’s just how things have been shaking out; from conception to completion it takes me about four to five weeks to finish one of these based on how busy things are in my day to day life. But there’s also another minor angle to things which is my ability to recall events and organize those memories into something cohesive. Or rather, I should say, my inability to do that. I draw a lot of blanks when I want to work on this “digital memoirs” project of mine and I suppose now that I’ve established enough posts here I can open up about this aspect of the process as well.
I cannot remember the majority of the past decade or so of my life.
It’s a frightening realization to make because broadly speaking you’re not aware of what’s happening by the simple nature of the problem being unable to attract your attention in the first place. You just… don’t know? For lack of a better explanation. You’re unaware that there is an issue because the manifestation of that issue plays double duty in hiding its very presence from you. I only noticed it a few years ago when after a good many years of working on personal growth and trying to get back into a healthier lifestyle I found myself unable to recall recent memories. I didn’t think much of it until I started working on this website again and realized that there are just entire gaps of time that I have little to no recollection of whatsoever. Moments that, if I didn’t have some tangible record of it having happened, I would not be able to recall anything about it in the slightest. Of course, part of my “healing process” upon departing from the furry fandom was to sell, give away, or ultimately destroy the majority of the things I’d collected over the years. As you might imagine, this has severely limited my ability to remember things.
Unconscious suppression of memories is a very common thing that happens to people who have been through traumatic events. The mechanism isn’t all that well understood but it’s believed to be a way for the brain to “protect” someone from painful memories replaying and causing further emotional distress. That said, I can still certainly remember a number of “bad things” that happened to me in enough detail to convey the story here but it’s really the surrounding context and in-between moments that are absent. The memory loss is mostly confined to a specific window of time; I can remember plenty of insignificant and mundane things from as far back as when I was in elementary school, but there just seems to be a massive blackout that extends after the early 2010’s. Presently, I have real problems turning short term memories into long term ones. It just doesn’t happen. In the here and now I can remember to do things (mostly), but even after a few weeks have passed I will have forgotten virtually anything that did not get written down.
The inability to form and keep memories can also be a result of a prolonged periods of intense stress or anxiety. There was an entire period between the end of 2017 and into around early 2021 where I just could not function in a healthy way. I was terrified of bogeymen, both online and in real life. I was convinced that people were stalking me because of my previous associations with others online. I was so wrapped up in this nonsense that for the longest time I just left the furry-adjacent stickers on the back window of my car because I was terrified that if I removed them the “stalkers” would notice and would use that as justification to harm me; I left them on for years believing that doing so would somehow fool them into leaving me alone and keeping their distance. As I write this I realize how fucking insane this sounds but there was a not-insignificant period where I lived with that fear every single day and it felt as real as the air I breathed. And that’s just one example; for that entire range of multiple years there wasn’t a single day where I felt I could relax and let my guard down. I was operating on high alert 24/7 and it would not surprise me if existing on edge like that did irreparable harm.
The big downturn for me was in 2020 when I was involuntarily committed to a mental health facility where I spent a little less than half a month cooped up in a place where I didn’t even have the privacy to take a shit on my own because of the belief that I (or anyone else) would somehow find a way to make a noose out of their sub-Holiday-Inn-tier “bath towels” the size of a McDonald’s tray liner and loop it over the top corner of the bathroom door. How I wound up there is embarrassing and complicated and I’m unwilling to elaborate on it beyond saying I became self destructive, caused damage to someone else’s property, and inadvertently injured myself in the process. My recollections of the facility are spotty but what little fragments I can recall aren’t kind.
Everybody who was there was a piece of shit, though I guess that makes me the idiot to have been surprised by that considering everyone else in the building wound up there in much the same way I did. If you want to argue semantics, I was probably a piece of shit too. The communal area was like a high school in regards to the collective mentality of the other patients. I remember trying to be amiable and social not because I wanted to make friends but because since I was there against my will I wanted to demonstrate to the nurses that I wasn’t going to find a way to turn their paper thin plastic flatware into a makeshift blade and stab the jugular of the first person to piss me off. I have a vague memory of sitting with a group of people at breakfast probably the day after I’d gotten there and they were just… not good people. I can’t explain it to you better than that. When I said “high school mentality” that’s exactly what it reminded me of, being excluded from a clique because I wasn’t “one of them”.
I didn’t want to be confrontational because even in my altered state I knew that raising my voice and calling someone an asshole, even if they deserved it and more, was very close to the bottom of the list of things I should be doing in that moment. I took my food and sat an empty table by myself. For breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner that day, and the ones that followed. It wasn’t worth it to me to be social with anyone, I figured if I just kept my head down and wasn’t antagonistic they’d discharge me quicker.
A few days in an older black woman who was also a patient came to sit with me and made small talk. For the life of me I cannot remember her name. Our first conversation was the stereotypical “so what are you in for” big house talk. She was dealing with substance abuse and family issues. I told her I was throwing chairs around and pointed out that was why my one of my pant legs was rolled up and my leg was wrapped in gauze. We talked about what we did in our personal lives in better times. I said I was a construction and renovation worker, which was true at the time, and before that was a once-notable writer who burned too bright too fast and that was why I ended up where I currently was. I probably made myself sound a lot more important than I really am. She pressed the subject and I handwaved it away with a loose description of the furry fandom and linked it into Robin Hood as a safe example. She said that was her favorite Disney movie when she was a kid.
She was the only person there who was nice to me. The hospital staff gave us small composition notebooks to use as a journal as part of our ad hoc therapy and they seemed upset with me because rather than write about my feelings in detail I just sketched dragons and other things that reminded me of nicer memories because I didn’t have anything to actually talk about. The day before that woman was discharged, which she was made aware of ahead of time, I sketched her a picture of Robin Hood in my notebook, tore it out from the binding, and handed it to the head nurse with the request that they give it to her when she left. There were no goodbyes. She was here one day, gone the next. Later that day the nurse let me know that the patient I made the drawing for wanted her to relay her thanks and well wishes. Given that for several days prior I didn’t speak to anyone other than the orderlies I guess that gesture was enough to sway them toward letting me leave the wing I was cooped up in and go do other “social activities”.
I have a loose memory of spending time in a gymnasium area that had a bunch of tables set up off to one side where the well-behaved people from other wings were taken to for socialization. I cannot remember if anyone else from my wing was escorted there; I don’t think the people who were shitheads to me at breakfast went there, but then again maybe it was optional and they just thought they were better than everyone else or something. I don’t know. An older Mexican man invited me to play dominoes with him, a game that up to that point I don’t think I’d played in a quarter of a century. I’d actually more recently “played dominoes” by way of standing them up into rows to knock down than actually playing the game itself. I told him I’d forgotten how, but he was nice enough to walk me through the steps. It was a good thing too because apparently this set of dominoes had wildcard icons on them that looked like a sunburst or something and while the game we played bore a passing resemblance to “dominoes” it was different enough that I wouldn’t have figured it out on my own anyways.
At some other point I returned to the gym and there were craft paints set up in about the same area. One of the on site therapists followed us over there and would casually go around asking people questions about what it was they were making. Honestly, it felt like an elementary school art class with the teacher making encouraging small talk. It kind of felt like I was being talked down to. I don’t recall recognizing the clinician playing 20 questions with me but she apparently knew who I was because I was in the middle of painting a dragon bust (the head, not the other thing) and the second or third question out of her mouth was something along the lines of “why do you keep making pictures of dragons”. I’m guessing someone else on staff had relayed to her that I was the slightly uncooperative one who didn’t actually write in their journal but instead sketched in it. I had the foresight to know not to tell her the absolute retard answer “oh because I like to pretend I am one and write up elaborate stories of her, yes her, in adult situations”. I just said that I was a fan of medieval art and stories and brought up how I’d go to Renaissance fairs as a kid.
Besides, I wasn’t painting a self portrait anyways; it was one of the characters from a story I’d written some nine years prior.
Eventually, after about two weeks of being in the hospital, the staff signed the papers to let me go and called my family to come pick me up. In the time I was there however the therapist I whom had brief daily sessions with made some changes to the medications I’d been taking because clearly the ones I had were not doing anything. One of the new things she prescribed was clonazepam (the generic form of Klonopin). If you’re unfamiliar with this drug it’s a very strong benzodiazepine and is also a controlled substance. The average dose of clonazepam is 0.02 milligram per kilogram of body weight. In 2020 the “average” dose for me should’ve been 2 mg. Instead, I was prescribed 3.5 mg. 4 mg is considered a “very high dose” and as far as I can tell no one prescribes anything over 5 mg even for the most serious of cases that this shit is supposed to treat.
When I told a family member, who was on clonazepam himself, that I’d been prescribed this and at how much he seemed concerned. His dose was less than 1 mg per day. Granted, he was also about 60 pounds lighter than me but that’s still a gap of 2.5 mg. He cautioned me about actually taking that much but I just shrugged it off because like a complete dumbass I still trusted Big Pharma. If this was a “controlled substance” then that meant it had to work, right? It’s one of the few drugs that is documented to do something instead of being some nebulous pseudo-placebo bullshit?
Well, it didn’t do anything to me. I took that and the other stuff I was prescribed and I did not feel any better. I was actually on clonazepam for about a year before I just stopped taking it wholesale because I was fed up with taking meds that had no measurable improvement on my well being. I literally went cold turkey on everything I was taking because the only effect I’d see from them was on the off chance I missed a dose and the resulting withdrawal symptoms were absolutely miserable. Stopping every single one of these pills without doctor oversight was probably not a very smart move but I knew they wouldn’t let me do that if I asked so really this was the only option as far as I was concerned. For at least three or four months I dealt with a near endless bout of what people on brain pills call “head zaps” which describes an infinitesimal split second where your entire face goes numb every time you shift your eyes or make a deliberate move of your head. If that sounds like an absolute nightmare then you’d be right, but I put up with it because I knew once all this shit worked its way out of my body it’d go away.
That was the case, but little did I know at the time that a bigger problem was in the process of unfolding. Long-term use of clonazepam has been shown to have a very severe detrimental effect on a wide slice of the people who take it. “Long-term” in regards to this drug is defined as longer than just four weeks. Not even a month. I was on this shit for a year, likely permanently if I’d just continued to follow through with meaningless treatment.
The inability to remember “everything” prior to a specific event combined with the inability to turn newer recent memories into long-term ones is called “anterograde amnesia”, and it’s apparently not that uncommon of a side effect of benzodiazepine use. I don’t think the clonazepam caused this specifically because the window of time regarding things I cannot remember precedes my stay in the mental hospital by several years, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was already some amount of existing damage that these worthless pills accelerated and made substantially worse. Anterograde amnesia is a spectrum (somewhat) but at its core the gist I gave is pretty much it. It’s something that I had properly documented by a mental health professional, though being able to pinpoint a deliberate cause of it is not as multiple potential causes apply to me.
Mercifully, the problems I have are not as horrific as the case studies you can read about online but it’s still something that has been a significant problem in my day to day life. Everything needs to be written down or I just forget about it completely, and I pretty much have to keep important things on my person all the time because if I set something down somewhere most of the time it’s as good as gone. It’s not just “little things” that I cannot remember either, the other day someone asked me about a person who was involved with a major production that I’d been a part of a few years prior (speaking in very vague terms here as to not inadvertently identify others who might not want to be associated with a website like this). I could not picture who this was in my head. I recognized their name, and that was it. This was someone I’d worked with intermittently for a couple of years and although a few more had passed since we were last involved I couldn’t tell you anything about them. When I looked them up I was reminded of a handful of things immediately but when asked out of the blue I could recall exactly nothing.
My ability to recall events post-2010’s isn’t completely destroyed as there are some things that do manage to make it to the part of my head that actually remembers things, but that doesn’t happen often. I don’t dream anymore. I can’t remember any “shower thoughts” and the other sorts of things that used to fuel my creative endeavors. I’ve forgotten a lot of the things I wrote and created. I fucked my entire life up and will likely remain solitary for the rest of my days because I’ve gratuitously blown every opportunity presented to me but it’s also saddening to think about how there’s a very real possibility that I could marry someone I loved dearly and just… not remember our wedding. I can experience life as it happens, but I won’t remember most of it anymore. When I try to reflect on things it’s just memories of how my life was when I was still in college or earlier, before the fall. The memories of my friends that I can recall the strongest are the ones of us in our youth playing with a camcorder filming the silly moments of our day to day experiences. We’re 25 years older now.
There’s a pervasive mentality among my generation that resents having to grow up and a strong desire to live in the past. All the time people post about “the good old days” and how good X Y and Z were, nostalgic social media pages farming likes and engagement over anything and everything. Even the stuff that sucked. There’s this wistfulness about how nice it would be to just exist in a bubble where you are surrounded by the things from your childhood that comforted you. Today, I could tell you the words to my favorite They Might Be Giants songs and all the episodes of Tiny Toons that I first heard them in. I could draw you a near perfect map of Green Hill Zone from the first Sonic game. I could tell you every single winner from the original runs of BattleBots and Robot Wars. However, I cannot tell you anything about TMBG’s recent music, any of the names of the newer Sonic characters, or who won the reboot seasons of BattleBots. I’ve seen or otherwise experienced all of those things, but I remember little to nothing from all of them. I am in that bubble these people so desperately yearn for.
I can tell you from personal experience, it is a hell like you cannot begin to imagine.
Until next time.
