Memory Loss and the Perspective

"You're going to get your A.A., then your B.A., then your Master's and then finally your Ph.D.," my mother sings to me while she's cooking dinner (a rare event, I must confess, Dad does the cooking almost without fail).

We briefly revisit the barriers to success, mainly my memory loss due to the ECT, a subject which my mother likes to comment on.

"What they did to you was a crime," my mother continues while mashing hamburger, referring to Stanford's insistence for eighteen months of electroshock therapy. She constantly reminds me of the things I've lost--anywhere from something as inconsequential as a viewing of a film or something more seriously like all my pre-calc and trig work (remarkably I received A's in those subjects). She'll ask me about memories of my childhood, and I won't be able to remember. She'll ask about college, and I won't remember.

I have only one picture of Joseph and I having sex, although we must have had sex more than once. But that's all I can recall. Us in the missionary position, him blissfully ignoring me due to his loss of perspective from the pleasure.

I have no memories of Hades, although I know that I went with him to Las Vegas, and then I visited him in Michigan. Everything else, I have written down. I don't even have an image of his face. I couldn't even tell you if I ever really loved him because I have no mental proof of any emotion I might have held for him. Was he a mistake? I can't discern because you need to know past and present actions to make that kind of judgment. To be honest, I feel nothing for him.

I know I had a lot of casual sex, because I wrote about it, but I can't remember a single countenance. Or any other body part. It's simply not there. I couldn't describe how many men I've slept with, much less what the experience was like.

I figured this absence of memory would be a safeguard for seeing Morpheus again in September of last year. I assumed that he would no longer turn me on nor would I be attracted to him. After all, it happened so long ago, and how can one man hold so much power? I have only a few scattered sequence of events, most of which don't make any sense because these are just moments in time, nothing connecting them to me or him. Nothing before, nothing after. But I saw him that night, and realized I was still in love with him.

In movies, it's sometimes assumed that if you forget who you are, you can become anyone, or more cheerily, someone better. I have an innate feeling that this is false.  Did I change? Yes, but not because I lost a large chunk of my identity. The illness changed me, not the treatment. I became more passive, more isolated, more humble, and in some instances, less compassionate because I was breathing out apathy. Now I had no reasons for acting the way I did/do, I just continue to be a self I am not familiar with.