Memory

.
As a child, I was both blessed and cursed with a good memory. Blessed because it meant I did well in school. What is arithmetic but the memorization of a set of numerical relationships? What is reading but the memorization of a cornucopia of words? What is history but the memorization of a tapestry of names, places, and dates?

But it was also a curse, because everyone said I was smart. Soon I began to believe it. And, being young, I didn’t know enough to hide my “smartness.” I gloried in knowing the answer when everyone else just looked back at the teacher with silent panic. I took it for granted that I would get the best grades. Pretty soon, everyone said I was stuck up. And I guess I was, a little.

But I was also clear-eyed enough to know that all I could do was memorize. I couldn’t invent a new way to use something. I couldn’t write a soaring poem. I couldn’t paint a beautiful picture. So I never thought my memory was a big deal. After all, if I could do it so easily, it couldn’t be that hard, could it?

When I got to college and had to master material without a textbook from which to memorize, I had a lot of trouble. But it didn’t really faze me. I had expected it. I told you I wasn’t really that smart, I wanted to say to people. But I could still remember things, and I got by, barely.

Then, a few years ago, a series of doctors began to prescribe medicines to treat the symptoms of my chronic depression. The worst of these were sleep problems. I couldn’t get to sleep at night, and if I did get to sleep, I couldn’t stay asleep. And I was miserable the next day. Sleeping pills, mood elevators, anti-depressants, anti-spasmodics, the whole kitchen sink, everything but anti-psychotics. And all of them had the side effect of drowsiness.

After a while, I was taking so much medicine that I was in a continual fog. My memory was gone. Where I had once been able to reel off the phone numbers of literally hundreds of people, I couldn’t look one up and remember it long enough to dial it. I had trouble adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. I just couldn’t make the numbers stay in my mind long enough to get the answer. Sometimes, even if I tried really hard, I couldn’t remember the subject of a conversation long enough to take part in it. I had to make my husband repeat anecdotes, sometimes even explain them to me.

It all came on me so gradually that I didn’t notice it, until one day when I suddenly realized that I wasn’t smart any more. This is what it feels like to be dumb, I thought. All those years I had taken for granted that I would be one of the most knowledgeable people in any room and now I lived in fear that other people would realize that I had no idea what they were talking about because I couldn’t remember what had been said more than a few minutes before.

Now I could see why some of my schoolmates had lost interest and stopped paying attention in class and why so many of them had simply not done the reading. If you can’t remember the names of the people and places being talked of, it’s hard to follow a narrative about them. And if you can’t follow a narrative, it’s hard to understand how it might affect you.

I began to realize how much unconscious arrogance I had had, arrogance that hadn’t been pierced by bad grades in college, arrogance so ingrained in my character that I couldn’t hide it. That was why I had always had trouble making friends, why people often didn’t like me for no reason that I could see, why people said I was stuck up. This is payback time, I thought. If only the kids I went to high school with could see me now. They would be sniggering to my face.

Luckily, about six months ago, something happened that caused the doctors to drop a great many of the medications I had been taking. Instead of sleeping pills, my doctor sent me to get a sleep study, and it was discovered that I have very, very bad sleep apnea.

When I'm asleep, I stop breathing, sometimes twice a minute, and come up to semi-consciousness long enough to start breathing again, then try to fall asleep again, only to stop breathing so that I have to come up to semi-consciousness long enough to start breathing again. I have been doing this over and over, every night, all night long, for years. It was the basis of almost all my other ills. Treatment of the apnea meant I needed even less of the medication that was fogging my brain.

Gradually, I have begun to regain my memory. I still find that if I don’t pay attention, I will lose the thread of a conversation, but I can remember numbers long enough to do arithmetic again. I still have trouble coming up with the exact word I want, but my husband tells me that’s just because I’m old. (He’s ten months younger than me and likes to make fun of me for it.)

It’s great to have the blessing of my memory back again, even if it is dimmed somewhat. But I’ll take care never to forget what I learned during those days when I didn’t have it at all.
.