memories & how they're made

i think i've talked about it here before, but i have aphantasia. (if i haven't, i have aphantasia lol.)

to be honest, while this was a huge revelation to me at the time, it doesn't really bother me. when i was looking up stuff about this online because i wanted to learn more, there were a lot of posts in online fora saying things like 'how can we fix this', 'i hate that i learnt this about myself', yada yada.

but i don't really feel like not being able to visualise stuff in my mind is in any way detrimental to my everyday life. i never had a problem living before finding out i had aphantasia, & i don't have a problem after.

however, i recently found out about severely deficient autobiographical memory (sdam). apparently, it is common in people who have aphantasia, & it refers to an ability to recollect/re-experience events in your own past.

i guess it makes sense that even though i literally just found out about this a couple of days ago, i can't actually recall the events that led up to me finding it. just that i somehow came across this article which talked about sdam, & as i was reading, all i was thinking was 'wait, so people can actually replay events from their past like that???'

i asked my partner who was just like 🤷 yeah, sounds normal to be able to do that, & i ended up doing a little quiz, asking mundane things like 'can you remember what outfit you were wearing yesterday'. (the answer was yes.)

the thing is, for me, i don't remember those kinds of details unless i actively try to do so. when i recall stuff from my past, i'm just remembering facts. so i know i bought yarn last night, but i don't remember what i saw at the shop, or what the person at the cashier might have said to me. i'm not sure what they looked like, though i must have seen them. i just didn't think to remember any of those facts, but i know i bought yarn because the yarn is in my house.

it's a bit hard to explain, because this is all normal to me. i can only take it at face value that some people (maybe the majority?) can actually visualise imagery in their heads, can actually recall events from their past.

i've always thought i had a rather good memory, actually, because i can usually remember anything i actively try to. i wonder now if that's because i've used my memory that way so often to remember stuff that has happened to me, since i don't relive memories in the traditional sense.

i never thought this was weird, because again, this felt normal to me. so sometimes people would say they remembered when we met up & we did all these things & the place we went to looked like this & the weather was beautiful & i would just accept that was true, & that they had just remembered a lot more facts about our meeting than i did.

i would then log those facts in my own memory, because there was no reason for me to think that people would lie to me about this kind of thing.

that's how my memory works - i remember the facts of something, & when new facts are presented to me, i store them too.

this worked for me pretty much all of my life... & then it didn't work for me on one occasion, about three years ago.

i had the misfortune of working with somebody who ended up spreading a lot of misinformation about me online. they prefaced this with a very angry message to me telling me about the awful things i had done, & i remember being at first confused, then panicked, because even if i didn't remember doing any of those things, maybe i had. they were so vehement that these were things i'd done, & i couldn't think of a reason that they would lie.

so when asked about the incident by some other people, i remember thinking to myself, well, i don't who to trust. me or them. & they're clearly angry. there must be a reason.

so i didn't do anything as they spread misinformation about me online. i tried to ask some people who were mutual acquaintances what they'd heard, because i wanted to figure out what i had done, since i didn't remember, & it didn't make sense to me -

but there was no way for me to remember, & no way for it to make sense, since it wasn't true.

at the time, i didn't know that though. so i had these things that i thought were 'facts' in my head, even though they didn't match up with the facts that i had.

i know now that there is episodic memory as well as semantic memory. episodic memory refers to the memory of everyday events, while semantic memory is the factual recollection of it. sdam affects episodic memory, but it does not affect semantic memory.

but since i lacked the episodic memory, i couldn't recall it as it happened. i had the semantic memory of what i remembered, & i had lived my life up until now adding facts to my memory when necessary -

so when somebody said i had done something i hadn't, i believed them, even if it didn't match up with my memory of it.

it was only afterwards when i went through my messages, checked my files, &c., that i was able to confirm that my memories actually were correct.

but for me, the damage had already been done. part of my brain had already 'remembered' the facts that weren't actually true - logged them as part of my semantic memory. it's much harder to unremember something than it is to remember it. similarly, people who'd seen the misinformation took it as fact, & i know now it's pretty futile to try to convince people to believe something isn't true when they are determined to believe that it is.

learning about sdam has reframed how this whole incident occurred. i remember thinking that there must have been something i could have done, or something i shouldn't have done, that there was a choice somewhere that would have resulted in a better outcome for everyone involved.

but i know now that i did the best i could with what i knew at the time, & even if the choices i took ended up hurting me, i made them out of kindness & a desire to believe in other people's good intentions.

i've made peace with the fact that there will always be some people out there that believe i've done something i didn't. i also have nothing to say to the person who spread the misinformation, since i don't think there's any point. but to the people who were so quick to point pitchforks, & the people who stood on the sidelines because they thought if they got involved they might have pitchforks pointed at them too - i hope that you are never put in the same position as me, but if you ever are, i hope that it can help you understand how it feels.

& to the me of three years ago, i'm sorry. i'm sorry i didn't believe you at first. i wish i could've believed in you when you felt like nobody else did. i'm sorry that i let you believe something about you that wasn't true.

but three years in the future, you're doing ok. the people who you felt abandoned by are people who have no place in your life now, & you're better off for it. you've actually become closer friends with a lot of people because of this incident, because you reached out when you needed help.

three years in the future, you find out you have sdam along with aphantasia, & while it shocks you at first, it'll just be another fun fact for you to remember.