Memory & Archiving 1: self-identity, change, embodiment, trust, intuition

Part 1 in a series of journalesque rambles on memory and archives.

This is the start of a little series, much less about referencing any sort of literature and much more about personal reflections. Though of course, I did not fall out of a coconut tree and all of my perceptions and thoughts on my lived experiences are informed by everything I’ve been exposed to. That also means that at my fresh age of 23, there’s a lot of life I have left to live that will inevitably shift so many of my thoughts here. I just aim to capture a few vignettes to describe what memory means to me and how I’ve been relating it to different ‘spheres’ as of late.

First up…

Part 1: The self/identity, change, embodiment, trust, intuition and memory (and archiving)

When I was little, around kindergarten or first grade, I remember being in the car with my mom and asking her about her friends when she was my age. She laughed and said she wouldn’t be able to remember any of the names of the kids in her class — it was too long ago — except for vaguely remembering her best friend at the time. Knowing every kid’s name in my grade at the time, this stunned me for a second. To think that so much of what I knew would become obsolete and fade out of my memory into nothing.

This was the earliest of my existential moments as a child, I was secretly very wistful and loved (and still love) the awe of realizing how small my slice of experience was. This one sort of spooked me though, since it made me question what it meant to be me in that moment. I thought to myself (less articulately, I was, like, 5), if I won’t remember most of the things I know now, will everything I currently know to be me soon cease to exist? Will I forget about this very real piece of myself, which right now is all I have?

It freaked me out, so I occasionally drilled myself on little facts about my life: my teachers for every class for each grade, the first and last names of all the kids in my grade, where I had gone for vacations and exactly when, which colours were my favourite, what my favourite smells were etc.

By high school I was keeping a little note page for some of this info since I was feeling myself starting to lose track — the more life I lived the harder the task became. I would paint a little vignette of different periods, with their smells, colours, and sounds. It’s a habit I lost in the whirlwind of covid and my undergrad, which I hope to return to.

Like a lot of people I know, I also tend to keep all kinds of little things — wrappers, receipts, tickets, fallen leaves, rocks, even locs of my hair. I dry every bouquet I get and keep them each in separate vases and containers. But I always get a ping of sadness and anxiety when so much has happened that I can no longer remember the little details despite my attempts — why did I keep this wrapper? Where is this rock from? What’s a souvenir if it can’t keep faithful to its namesake — ‘memory’?

It almost feels like the sacredness of these things gets forgotten, a type of disrespect. The memories start to get distorted and you start to mix up the order of events. Despite the mind seemingly dismissing their value as storage dwindles, they become even more emotionally sacred. I’m a rather sentimental person, and I often wish I could protect and encase all the memories of my mind, all of those previous versions of me. I mourn the kind of person I would be if I could remember everything I’ve ever learnt. Take the good parts of each slice of me and let the bad stay lost to time.

Even then, I often still want to remember so much of the bad. Those can be such important moments in understanding and coming to terms with what has shaped you, which can provide useful insights for reshaping yourself. Then again, I might not have lived enough life yet the way that others have, perhaps there will be things I’ll want to forget. Even now, the remembering of negative things often leads me down a slippery slope to rumination. I remind myself to loop and ‘ruminate’ on positives to help balance things out.

For the last while, photos, videos, and candid audio recordings have been the main mediums for my personal archiving of memory. For one, there’s the convenience of digitization. It automatically attaches metadata to the files like the exact date, time and location. I think subconsciously I also feel like those mediums are even more reliable and potent than the physical items I collected and little notes I would jot down since they’re ‘verbatim’ and more faithful to the little details. The sound of my mom’s voice, the way my dad and I chit chat, the humour me and my friends use, the sound of the wind and the creek and the leaves altogether at that moment, the way I would do my makeup and style myself, the view out the car window. After all, when I do make art, I’m much more of an audiovisual creator and collager than a poet.

If you saw my previous post on the cause of hiccups and other things I took away from my undergrad, you may recall my musings on the idea of the self as a river (from Buddhism), with no essential unchanging substance but rather being made of this ‘flow’ or chains of causality. Check that post out for more details! But here I just want to highlight the idea’s importance in my coming to terms with constant change and the unreliability of memory. Zhuangzi mentions how forgetting as things change from one to another is natural. Perspectives change and the former perspective is not necessarily remembered.

And yet, I feel that all previous selves live on through their ripples of influence on my current self. In tending to and caring for them, I tend to and care for myself. I think of myself as always connected to all of my ancestors through these chains of causality in the same way that all of the water which flows through the river is somehow related.

Thanks to some more spiritual knowledge I’ve learned laterally from Filipino, Zimbabwean, and Indigenous Turtle Island friends and thinkers, I’ve been able to connect more with this idea of ancestral connection as a diasporic Egyptian and what that means to me.

Here’s where my mental sprawling evidence-board-mind-map-matrix zooms in on the connected ideas of embodiment, love, and self-trust.

One practice I never explicitly noticed but have now set an intention to regularly return to is a practice of remembering which a Coast Salish and Dene indigenous elder named Rosemary Georgeson discussed in a storytelling workshop on Galiano Island. My rambles are very inspired by this convention of sharing information with rich context and stories — I do love anecdotal communication after all. She also talked about how healing it was for her to put her bare feet on this ground. To take breaks from the city noise to hear noises her ancestors have been listening to since time immemorial. She guided us to open all of our senses and let the land and surroundings remind us of memories. Be still. Move around. Dance with the trees and the wind, or lay and press yourself into the ground. Hum along, or be in silence. Just as long as you observe and listen.

There’s something about the ‘letting go’ of this practice that was really healing for me. Not trying to drill myself on semantic facts or retrieve or review memories. And yet, sitting there, catching a particular smell, or following a random train of thought sparked by the sight of some little bugs weaving through the grass… brought a feeling of ‘being myself’ and actually being present. Of course, the occasional memory drifting my way was gratifying and nostalgic, but more than anything it felt like those random wisps of self-knowledge and observation were arising from somewhere that was beyond myself. Memories of the tiniest randomest things and their accompanying emotional states appeared as if they just rolled off a leaf above me and floated onto my head.

I’m dipping my toes into some thoughts for a future installment on ‘memory and place’, but this practice helped me realize the pieces of myself remembered by my senses. I realized for a long time my fixation on trying to ‘focus’ on the moment and what’s in front of me (coincidentally coinciding with the diagnosis of my ADHD) blocked me from allowing myself to honestly respond to my physical and mental experience. In turn, I was preventing my mind from freely and easily wandering in a way that was nourishing and a crucial part of my worldbuilding, self-memory, reflection, and identity. This taught me a lot about what kind of meditative approaches work for me (e.g. I currently prefer approaches which are more about observing your mind, body and surroundings as opposed to slowly trying to clear your mind and focus on something like the breath).

I also realized that overstimulation, overwhelm, and burnout had also been blocking this restorative process (unsurprisingly) since I had to push myself out of my body to cope. This kind of ‘muting’ of oneself mirrors my discussions surrounding embodiment, ADHD, and eating habits from my qualitative research (as per a previous blog post), and it’s fascinating to mentally work through how it can also impact my sense of identity. Now, in moments of crisis, often those of identity, I try to listen to the wind. I try to listen to my body. I try to listen to those echoes and ripples of the people, places, and experiences since the start of time that put me here.¹ (I know it’s a footnote but it’s worth a read— I just don’t want to be any more convoluted than I already naturally am!)

What I hear reminds me not just of episodic or semantic memories. There’s certainly something more to my history than just that. I don’t yet have the tools to describe what that ‘more’ is. If it’s memories of from the most minute to the most ritual of habits. Something to do with my resting state patterns. Something greater than the sum of any of those parts. But the above process helps me access some of whatever that is, and it might do the same for you too.

Just this past summer, I got to join in on Beck’s Motivated Cognition Lab’s yearly lab retreat to her farm in BC’s interior, which was so incredibly lovely. While at ‘Frog Farm’, where that video of the frog above was taken, one of our pastime discussion topics was what each of our core values were. My short answer was love and beauty. My long answer was very long and elaborated a lot on all the additional core values that I think are encapsulated in love and in beauty. Bell Hooks is a great place to start when breaking down the idea of love. She says that love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. I want to touch a little on self-love, and what that means in terms of embodiment, memory, and intuition.

On that note of ‘knowledge’, I’m immediately reminded of that saying, ‘to be loved is to be known’. I think about this a lot in terms of self-love, and what it means to know an ever-changing self. I still don’t have a great answer. But I do think that learning to listen and trust oneself is probably a good start.

When thinking about memories triggered by physical habits, feelings, and the experience of places, I realized that the physical self is in itself a valuable personal archive. There have been so many times when my body has known or remembered things that my mind didn’t — a sort of embodied intuition. Sometimes my body knows a route I haven’t walked for a while better than my mind since I couldn’t tell you a single direction. Sometimes, like in the workshop with Rosemary, my sensory experience brings a thought forth into my conscious awareness.

Stick with me here, it’s another example. I used to get a lot of headaches as a kid, and I remember once having a dream where I was trying to fly a small plane over a chasm, and I crashed into the side of the opposing cliff. Laying face down on an icepack, I couldn’t help but replay the bizarre dream in my mind’s eye and I came to feel better. It was weirdly peaceful, just slowly floating downwards as I pulled back and looked up. Since — that was about 13 years ago now — whenever I get a headache I always remember that dream and it helps me feel better. About 2 months ago, I came to the realization that because my headaches are often tension-related, looking up and lightly raising my eyebrows (to relax them) was helpful. About 1 month ago, I realized that’s the exact facial expression I make with my eyes closed when I imagine that scene. I know this example sounds ridiculous, but it’s one of my most notable experiences of my embodied knowledge surpassing my conscious knowledge. It also speaks to the power of trust in intuition and its associated rituals and habits, especially in the context of self-care.

So how can we bring things full circle? Not to quote myself from my previous post, but in any authentic journal entry of mine, there’s gonna be something else I wrote as part of a separate thought copy and pasted in. So, here’s a summarized reminder of where I got with conceptions of the self and change:

“Although there’s little to grasp onto that won’t slip through your fingers, all is not lost. Chains of causality tether you to all previous, present, and future versions of yourself. In those ripples, if you can watch and listen closely enough, you will never permanently lose any core piece of yourself despite constant evolution. Even in the physical, when all of your original cells get replaced, your new cells will be informed by every cell before them — not only cells of your own but also the cells of all of your ancestors. Like water flowing through and carving meanders into the river, informing the water’s course over millennia, the water that’s flown through me in the past is not forgotten. All of it is part of me, and will always be.”

When trying to put all this nice-sounding philosophy into practice it was helpful for me to try to break it down in terms of Hooks’ components of love. For one, I need to commit to the regular practice or ritual of observing my phenomenal experience and surroundings and the memories that may arise from them. I have a responsibility to myself to listen and respond to my embodied memories and emotions when they try to tell me something. I trust my intuition, as it is informed by all of my memories, younger selves, and all further previous links in my causal chain, and so I owe it to myself and those links to be guided by it. I trust that while my mind may forget, my body remembers. Out of respect for this land, I trust that it, too, will help me remember what matters as long as I listen. I need to be caring towards myself, especially the younger versions of myself I access when I practice remembering. I should tend to my emotions in response to too much or too little change and forgive and soothe myself when I remember something extraordinarily embarrassing that I did 7 years ago. I also hope to take as much care when I can to collect personal archives and to organize, display, adorn, or surround myself with my archives and memories in a way that honours them and brings me joy. ²

With all of this, I can cultivate self-knowledge and wisdom, which I trust to use with care, respect, and appreciation of what I have been, am, and can be.

Coming soon:
Part 2: Shared memory
Part 3: Place and memory (and archiving)
Part 4: Morality, drifting, and memory

1. I get shy sometimes sharing all of this talk about ‘ripples… echoes… ancestors… dawn of time’.... It’s stigmatized by a lot of people (even unintentionally), especially in the context of science or academic spaces, and I often get imposter syndrome as I try to put these special experiences into words. (I can’t help myself but also mention this is probably related to colonialism in a lot of ways. For example, I feel like since many cultural spiritual schools of thought have been appropriated and diluted into things that are no longer true to the original ethos, others who see these assimilated, decontextualized, and depraved sets of approaches are more easily inclined to then view the whole spiritual/s endeavour as illegitimate.) As we’ve seen in the way that most history books retell the origins of science, technology, and intellectualism, the West tends to read knowledge or wisdom written like poetry or presented like art as fictional and ‘mystical’. Or sometimes as delusions involving aliens (my fave). I say all this because I want to contextualize where I’m coming from when I link spiritual experiences and practices into these discussions where I’m also bringing in ideas like embodiment as they are scientifically defined (to me, and many scholars in the area, embodiment is not a metaphor) — these things can coexist! Maybe I don’t have to tell you that, but some people need to hear it!

2. Seriously considering your physical self as a personal archive is one of the most fun ways to do this, in my opinion! My body is a temple and I’m going to decorate it! This note on honouring and decorating is also one of the huge components of my core value of beauty (to wind back a bit). I think beauty also plays a huge role when it comes to the point about respect and appreciation of the land and all of your surroundings.