The stream of selves

Letters from the Inside #2

How strange it is to go through the stuff in your attic and literally feel your life going through your hands. There are physical items that remind you of sounds, voices, noises, scents, colors. Like a stream of all your past selves passing by — little movie clips playing one after the other.

What truly lives inside you isn’t just those past versions of yourself. It’s made up of everything you’ve experienced, the people you’ve loved, the places you’ve been, the moments you’ve carried. All those encounters leave pieces behind. And even though life moves forward, nothing really leaves you.

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Sometimes I think life, in the end, will be summarized in a series of little movie clips. Actually, that is what happened to me while in the hospital right after the stroke. When I lost the capacity to really understand the world around me. That lasted for around three days only, but weirdly enough I do remember. I do remember that there were so many flashbacks. I can’t recall the exact flashbacks, but they made me think afterwards what a wonder the brain is, when your sense of time falls away, life is no longer lived in a straight line.

We are so occupied with life moving forward. The future is what’s to come, the past is what we leave behind. But those flashbacks taught me that memories are not stored in neat order. It’s a big mash-up of your life, all engraved in your brain.

We live pretty linear. Years, weeks, days, hours. But when it comes to the experience of a life — we don’t leave our core memories behind when we move onwards. All those experiences are still with us, surrounding us, forming us, comforting us, maybe even distressing us.

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Food gives perhaps one of the most concrete examples of how the past never really leaves. During both my pregnancies I suffered from Hyperemesis Gravidarum. Which means you can’t eat or drink anything without throwing up. Two times nine months of struggling to eat, to drink, while living with crippling nausea, and still trying to feed the babies growing in my belly. I used a diver’s clip on my nose to block out all smells, hoping it would stop my brain from giving the signal to throw up.

And what I discovered during the second pregnancy was that the only food I could tolerate was food that carried a familiar scent from my childhood. My mother, a great cook, regularly brought me dishes I specifically asked for. The stuffed tomatoes from the oven she made for holidays, the Thai noodles she sometimes prepared, the pastas and rice salads we had for dinner countless times. Food is emotion. I think it’s registered like that in our brains. Apparently, for these dishes, my brain stores a memory of comfort: it’s okay, relax, no need to worry, just enjoy. Eating these meals again brought back so many memories of all those days spent together with family.

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And then the sounds. Another such concrete example. I remember so many sounds. Brains register memories through sounds. Not just songs, but tones, voices. The way my grandfather would pick up the phone when I called him: “Haaaaa Annetjeeeeee.” It’s been eight years since his passing and his voice still rings in my ears, and I love that.

When I came home after the stroke, grief was etched so deeply into my body that I couldn’t sleep at night. Alone in my room (to limit the stimuli), I would wake up, my brain in pain, alerting me to take my medication. And I would sit there at the edge of my bed, in silence. I cried so much. The grief, the grief.

Until one night, a memory popped up from my early childhood. My father would always sing us a goodnight song. I don’t think this is a very common choice for a children’s lullaby, but for my father it was always Yesterday by the Beatles. Even as I write this, I hear his voice. I texted him: “You know what, I was thinking of that bedtime song you used to sing. Do you remember?” Of course he did.

The next day, I suddenly received a voice recording from him, an MP3. Yesterday. The full song, recorded by him. “To listen to when the night is difficult to carry.” I cried. I cried again, but this time for the gift of receiving that memory back in a real almost physical form.

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I love memories. I love going through old stuff. I believe that as we move through life, we shed some of our skin along the way. We leave parts of ourselves with others to carry. To remember us by. Just as others do for us. When we lose someone close, they are never really gone. We carry them with us.

That’s perhaps also why, after years, living again in the city where I grew up feels like both coming home and stepping back into all those memories. Every street carries echoes of those days. As I cycle past them, they pop up — not as sharp stings, but as quiet comforts.

The evenings hanging out with friends on the schoolyard. Sitting with a girlfriend on top of the small playhouse roof, discussing who we had fallen in love with this time. The grass field next to my old high school, where he once whispered to me: “You will forever be my one and only young love.” It was me who broke his heart afterwards. Something better was waiting for me, it turned out.

And I still know many of those friends from back then. They live deep inside my heart. We can go months, even years, without seeing each other. But the bond remains familiar. Because pieces of their past selves stayed with me, and the same holds true for me with them.

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Love builds a life. Most of these core memories revolve around some element of love. The building up, the loss of love, the grief over love, giving love, carrying love with us.

When my daughters ask me: “But what if you’re not here anymore?” I tell them: even if I’m no longer physically here, I’ll always be part of you. Because we are not simply made up of ourselves. We are made up of all the experiences and memories we’ve shared with others, the parts they handed us to carry along with us through life.

That’s also why I often watch Inside Out with my daughters. Those movies carry so many life lessons, truly wonderful. In the movies, some memories fade and disappear into the big blue piles. But in real life, I don’t think they do. They move, they swirl, they stay alive. Always shifting, but always present somewhere quietly in the back. The big ones, and the small ones.

(If you haven’t watched Inside Out yet, go do that after reading this. It is so heartwarming and comforting.)

We live. We shed skin. We leave parts behind with others. And others leave parts with us. And what they leave with us — that’s what builds a life.

Layer upon layer, hidden in our attics, hidden in our brains.