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by phaedrus
808 days ago
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I'm undiagnosed but personally I suspect I am autistic. I have hyperphantasia + eidetic memory, but I have periods of my life (years) with almost no autobiographical memory. The tape is blank or the index has been lost, or I was just too lost in thought to lay down any record what was going on around me. Mostly before the age of 12; I can access only a few disconnected moments out of time. I was moved to tears when I used Google Street View to explore streets of a city that I know factually my father and I had walked through extensively, but I couldn't recognize a single thing or feel any personal familiarity with it. It's hard to explain why that upset me so much. |
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As a random example, a co-worker showed me his very expensive fountain pen. That prompted a memory -- after having completely forgotten for at least twenty years -- that in high school I exclusively used cartridge-based fountain pens! That aspect of my life just *poof* vanished from my memory when I switched to felt-tip pens, and was suddenly swapped back in from an archive tape when I saw a fountain pen in front of me.
This wasn't a small detail of my life! My father got me those pens. They were German-made and he was very proud that he found them at absurdly low prices at a garage sale compared to their real value. I had to buy the cartridges, and they were hard to find. I had a special resealable container to contain leaks. I was proud of the dramatic improvement in penmanship this enabled. Etc, etc...
Just gone. Absolutely vanished. If you had asked me randomly if I ever used fountain pens, I would have said "no". It wasn't until I physically picked one up that it all came flooding back.
PS: I remember maybe a dozen things about my childhood apartment and its surrounds that I grew up in. Don't feel bad!