The Memory Mine

I love listening to other people’s stories. But part of the reason I became such a good listener is because it’s an easy way to avoid talking about myself.

I spent twenty-something years telling other people’s stories — helping individuals and organisations, museums and exhibitions, to connect with an audience using time-worn storytelling techniques.

But the more energy I put into helping others tell their story, the more unseen I felt. The more I realised I had no access to my own stories. I was blocked.

For most of my adult life, I thought I just had a terrible long-term memory. I could recall very little of my childhood or of my teenage years. Even my early adulthood was fuzzy. When my peers told tales of first concerts, first crushes, holidays past, I dredged my data bank of personal memories and came up with zilch. I honestly thought my brain was broken.

And it wasn’t something I could talk about. It didn’t seem important to anyone else. But it bothered me. Our memories — the stories we tell about ourselves and our experience — are cultural and generational touchstones. They age us. They unite us. They define us as belonging to one generation, to one tribe or another.

We connect to one another through the stories we tell. When you’re missing those shared references, you miss those connections.

I felt those missing connections to my peers keenly. But the connection I missed most was the one with myself. Without memories, who was I?

Only by deliberately seeking out tools to prompt my memory, by challenging the story I told myself of my “poor memory” did I realise that the memories were there. They maybe weren’t the same as my peers’. But they were there.

And once the memories started to flow, whooo-weee! One memory led into another like ants following a trail of jam. My memory had never been the problem.

I had been taught not to trust or to value my own experience. That my memory, my story, was of lesser value than others’ and not to be trusted.

And as an adult, I had shut out the good memories for fear of unlocking the bad. One thing I now know for sure about memories — good, bad and middling — they are all important.

They are all part of the beautiful, chaotic, muddled mystery of a kaleidoscope that make you, you. Yes, some memories are tough. But when we let the fear of the bad stuff get in the way of the good, the bad stuff wins.

However unremarkable we think our lives have been, there are moments of beauty and joy and connection in all of us. We all have a story to tell. Sometimes we just need a little help to draw out the stories that make us.