THE DUNGEON: From Supercomputer to Filing Cabinets 3
How dangerous it can be when TBI hides your memories in the dungeon.
In case it’s not obvious: yes, I’ve written this series in second-person, but I am by no means telling YOU what you should do about YOUR brain, traumas, and life. Only you and your care team can decide that.1 I’ve written it this way to help you step into my shoes more clearly and viscerally.
Dig, if you will, this picture:
You once had a supercomputer inside your skull. It got smashed on the freeway by a drunk driver. Now you operate out of a nasty, creepy basement, storing all your memories in musty manilla folders inside row after row of filing cabinets. (That’s PART 1, if you missed it.)
Joyest of joys, all these cabinets are organized…
Drumroll, please…
🤘 ALPHABETICALLY. 🤘
Except when they’re not organized at all. Or when things get misplaced. Or mislabeled. Or when you open up a folder and everything inside it is just…
GONE.
From: Part 2 -
OBLIVIATE2
But who cares, right? What do we reeeeeally need to keep memories for anyway? Heck, wouldn’t you be lucky to not remember the awful shit that’s happened in your life? Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up clean-slated every morning?
Ummmm…no.
Especially not when your body and your subconscious still remember.
This kind of inefficient filing system makes for a nightmare when asking yourself things like, “Why am I avoiding this person/activity/location? Why am I so pissy with this person/situation? Why am I depressed? Why do I feel like my skin is crawling every time he touches me? Don’t I love him? Doesn’t he love me? He says he does. Why do I want to fucking explode right now? What is my major malfunction!”
Having everything filed alphabetically and sometimes randomly means that it’s much more difficult to decipher whole pictures from a myriad details, to extrapolate themes, make deductions, comprehend meaning, and apply understanding to other affected areas.
This means important decision-making is a Spoon-Devouring Beast.3 Heck, little routine decisions like what you’d like to eat for the next week, or which brand and type of laundry detergent you should get, or if you should take the freeway versus the business route to your chiropractor today…these decisions can be ornery, sluggish mules, so major ones? It’s a serious problem.
Decisions that can be made are often based on incomplete data. Sometimes you don’t even realize that a decision needs to be made. You just know that you’re miserable or aggravated, and can’t figure out why.
When you can figure it out, translating your emotions from the cumbersome language of this filing system in the basement, past the door gorilla, and into verbal communication comprehensible to human beings…?
Well, that is a different part of the brain that was also damaged, and a feat that you—for all your supercomputerishness—even had trouble with as a kid. Really, it’s because of the supercomputerishness, but we’ll get into all that some more on another day.4
Instead, let us return to what used to be the supercomputer’s storage system. Because bringing in shiny new filing cabinets for the storage of new memories won’t do you any good if you have nothing to stuff into the folders.
Will it?
CONVERTING NEW SHORT-TERM MEMORIES INTO LONG
So no shit, there you are. Night after night, you huck your handy box of the day’s doings down the stairs where you file your documents, images, and other keepsakes into the correct folders. Sometimes you have to shuffle things around to make room.
Other times, a filing cabinet gets tired of being overstuffed and unable to be closed properly—it doesn’t like that, you see. So while you’re asleep, the Filing Faeries surreptitiously rifle through your old, unopened, obsolete folders. Everybody has these helpful little beasties. They determine what to shred so you can hope to stuff new documents into whatever type of storage format you use.
Unfortunately, ever since you had to move down here into the basement, even your most recent documents don't always stay put.
Actually, no.
Especially your most recent documents don’t stay put. Your old files mostly do what they’re told. With exception of those few incidents that were randomly OBLIVIATED when the contents of your skull got both shaken and stirred like a flight of confectionary cocktails, the memories you had prior to the supercomputer’s destruction are fine. They sit-and-stay in their dusty, musty folders very nicely.
It’s storing new data that is the problem.5
What you don’t realize is that you no longer have helpful Filing Faeries. They chowed down your crumpled metal and burned rubber off the blacktop just after midnight on Winter Solstice, so now you’ve got Gremlins instead. At night, while you’re drooling on your pillow, these green little cacklers go to work. More like play. They’re assholes, you see, and they have dark senses of humor.6
They like to lurk in the shadows, keeping track of everything you meticulous filed throughout the day. Then at 4:56 a.m., they swipe it all and use it to make a merry bonfire for themselves until you wake. Screeching in delight, they roast weenies and deep-fried Twinkies over your daily memory shrapnel. Occasionally, the ashes go up to Memory Heaven where you will only see them again after you croak.
Remember the Lost Zill Dance? Yeah. Like that. Poof!
The rest get sent the other direction. We call this place The Dungeon. In this place, your memories are not merely difficult to locate and even more onerous to access, like they are in the basement filing cabinets. Nope, it’s almost like they’re GONE.
But they’re actually not.
We confirmed this annoying phenomenon at my last neuropsych exam. They do mostly get stored. Just not in any place where you can find them yourself. These hidden folders can only be accessed when they’re triggered by some external stimulus that catapults you down into the Dungeon of Swiped Memories.
For years after your big car wreck in 2000, you didn’t even know this place existed, much less that most of your memories had been getting hurled down there night after night after night...
GREMLINS & THE DUNGEON
Check it: In the morning, you wake up. You go about your day. You fill your box. Maybe someone asks you about something you did yesterday, so you dash down to the basement to look up the answer in the filing cabinets, only to discovery that yesterday’s daily log is missing.
Perhaps there will be one fuzzy, grainy Polaroid to goad you.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps you’ll do a full system analysis and realize that Gremlins have been shredding, torching, and dungeoning most of your memories for the past three days. No, three weeks! Perhaps this has been going on for months. Or many, many months until you realize that you only have a handful of snapshots for the first three years after your supercomputer was smashed before your very eyes on that bridge overlooking Uintah Street.
Oh, but the car wreck itself?
Man, we have that thing in VR and in HD from four different angles, including the forehead cam and the one mounted to the overhead drone. Trauma gets stored in the brain differently than your average memories, you see.
Everything else from that year, including…oh, little incidents like planes ramming the Twin Towers?
Pffffft...
For the folder dated 9/11/01, you have a muffled audio recording of the morning phone call telling you to turn on your television NOW, a couple 3-second video clips of a plane crashing into a tower as viewed from your tiny VHS/TV unit, and a couple pages of the incident report. Unfortunately, coffee got spilled on the report and most of the ink has run. You've hand-scribbled a stickie note after having conversations with others who were traumatized by that world event:
"Apparently this was a really huge thing for our country. I have mixed feelings about the fact that I barely remember it."
At least you have your museum galleries of the Impressionist paintings you made to console yourself because the last two-and-a-half decades of your life are just…
Fuzzy.
So the next time you find yourself with a guy you haven’t known for very long and suddenly start wondering in exasperation how the honeymoon can be over already—it’s only been six months so why are you fighting all the time? Why do you reflexively shudder in revulsion when he kisses your neck? Why are you both absolutely miserable with each other?
Perhaps you’ll climb that other set of rickety stairs into another dusty space. In the back of the attic, in another cardboard box, you’ve stored the last four years of journals written religiously every morning since that summer you did Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.7 You have other, more sporadically scrawled journals since you were nineteen. So perhaps you’ll start digging for clues about how everything went sideways by reading about your life, staring with the night you met that gorgeous guy at that one place that one time.
If you’re very, very lucky, perhaps you’ll read—in your own hand, in your own words—what he did to you three-and-a-half months into the relationship when he was very, very angry with you in the alley on the way home.
Perhaps you’ll read month after month of your familiar penmanship asking the same questions and coming to the same conclusions every day, only to ask the same questions and come to the same conclusions the next day because Gremlins shredded the incident report and the calendar entry overnight.
Perhaps you’ll read your suspicions that he doesn’t really seem to like you very much, which means he certainly can’t be in love with you like he swears he is whenever you start poking him about the subject.
But you know. Deep in there somewhere, you just KNOW. You can feel it in your guts and your bones and every one of your raised hairs.
Never mistake: you’re correct about how much he dislikes you, and sometimes he demonstrates it in a most physical and/or psychological manner.
You just don’t remember it the next morning.
So perhaps you’ll read about what he did when he was very, very angry with your cat (although you know it was actually you he was angry with, but he couldn't do that to you and not go to jail). Perhaps you’ll read about what he does, day after day after week after year, frequently when he walks in from his workday and you chirp, “Hi, honey!” at him, only to feel the invisible knife go in.
Perhaps you won’t shove those journals back into the attic and allow the Gremlins to shred this report overnight. Perhaps you’ll scrawl a sticky-note and press it inside a new manilla folder called:
“What I Forgot He’s Been Doing.”
The folder is empty now. But perhaps the next time you go digging in your files about this relationship for clues as to why you’re so unhappy, you’ll notice the manilla folder and spy your handwritten note:
--Go to attic. See Journals: December 2000 to current date! NOW.
Better still, perhaps you’ll leave the sticky note under your favorite coffee cup so you’ll find it first thing in the morning after he’s left for work.
I hope you will.
I did.
That itching you feel in the back of your skull? That scratching noise—the one you hunt for all over your house and can’t figure out where it’s coming from? It’s inside you. You might not remember.
But your subconscious does. Your body does.8
It speaks in your gut instincts. It shouts in your visceral reactions that you can’t explain. And if you’re very, very lucky…
Today you are lucky.
BECAUSE YOU
FUCKING
WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN.
Remember?
So go on. Make yourself a cup of something comfy, wrap yourself up in your blankets with your fur-friends curled up around you, and let your old self tell you some tales. Make sure you have all the proper supports to do this, because you’re about to be very, very shocked to learn who you are, and who other people have been with you.
Don’t be afraid of it. Go in there and dig up the bones of who you’ve been. Take in a good whiff of the rotting flesh and enjoy all the worms squirming in your eye sockets. Let them squirm. They’re making fertilizer for your rebirth. Go on and watch that big, creepy eel slither out your skull’s wide open jaws, and then let it
⚡️ ZAP. ⚡️
It took me three tries and two failures, but I got baffled and I got curious. So I re-read those old journals until the Gremlins wouldn’t even contemplate shredding my memory of what I had been living with since that Winter Solstice when a drunk driver rammed me on the freeway.
Granted, I was no peach to live with. I’m still not. Even so.
#NoExcuse.
You dump somebody
before you abuse them.
You just do.
⚡️ PERIOD. ⚡️
Eventually, I read my words so many times that I was able to construct a mental videotape for myself—a patchwork collection of images outlining what I needed to remember. That helped me design a roadmap out.
When I was ready, I yanked that pretty, ceramic plate out of the homey kitchen cupboard in my mind. Smashed that fucker against the wall so I would never eat off it again. I’d been dining upon it all those years, you see, feeding myself the bullshit of some fantastical love-match I’d painted in my dreamy Impressionist style from the haze of what I could remember. With the shards, I slashed my way free of what kept me bound to that place. I took my clothing, my costumes, my computer, my cats, and I shoved it all in my car.
Of course, I also took a weighty box filled with page after page of my memories. Since I started writing them on a daily basis in 2000, I have four of those boxes now. And I don’t store them in the attic anymore.
So there it is.9
I can’t help you understand what it’s like to live with Traumatic Brain Injury.
I can only help you understand what it’s like to live with mine.
UP NEXT: FORGETFUL LUCY - I don’t have complete anterograde amnesia. What I have is that gallery of fuzzy Impressionist paintings.
© 2020 Hartebeast
RELATED POSTS:
TBI, DISABILITY & ABUSE
Obviously I’m not a mental health practitioner. I only live with this crap, and try my best to deal with it and heal. As such, especially if it’s the super-bad place, I’m not the person to ask about this stuff.
These people are:
988 SUICIDE & CRISIS HOTLINE
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HOTLINE
RAINN - NATIONAL SEXUAL ASSAULT HOTLINE
MEMORY
Memory Consolidation - from short-term to long-term
How does the brain heal itself? Understanding neuroplasticity after TBI
Journaling after TBI: not only for memory recovery
Spoon Theory - another great metaphor for what it’s like living with a chronic health condition.
That summer I did Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a couple months before my big car wreck.
One of the best books I have ever read in my life: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind & Body in the Healing of Trauma
Don't want to read the book? Here's the basic premise of what trauma does to the body and why talking about it, even in therapy, so often doesn't solve the problems: Short Version. Or Long Version by the author himself
The playlist I made about this phenomenon. Because that’s what we do around here.
We also dance it. LOVELY: A Dance With Roses (and thorns) - one of the dance therapy projects that helps me work through all of this. It’s over on my art & nature publication. But art therapy isn’t only good for the heart. It’s good for the brain, too…
What struck me the most about this piece was how your body and unconscious remembers — but that your mind doesn’t!
That is something I had never thought about in terms of TBI, but it makes so much sense now that you’ve explained it. It also helps illuminate how hard things must be for you, when you can’t even begin to intellectualise why your body feels a certain way in response to certain stimuli. I mean, it’s hard enough to understand our emotions as it is, let alone when we have lost the memories that trigger them.
This was really insightful, Alexx! :)
Any way we can reframe fuzzy into things like slippers and woobies? Impressionistic like something the Leverage team wants to keep in their HQ? Dungeon in a good way, not in the H H Holmes or Tower of London way?
Any way TBI stands for Totally Bitchin' Italian? Can we MAKE it stand for that? About time we made it our bitch instead of the other way around, non? >:)