by Chloe Tran
Some bits of my life are utterly seamless and continuous.
And then there are the bits that are not.
They have not vanished but they exist in a different kind of time, a bit like sealed rooms in a house I officially own, but don’t always possess the keys to. I sense them and can sometimes hear the muffled sounds from inside; I can feel their presence and perhaps sense their resonance in my present, but I cannot always step inside of them when I choose. Instead, I learn of them later: told by the lips of others, by the slight softening in the tone of their voices, by their brief pause before the necessary details were filled in for me.
I have since discovered that memory is not a single thread. Memory is a weave and a stitch. It unravels at times and it slips. Sometimes, the stitches rearrange themselves into patterns I don’t entirely understand. For a long time, I thought this meant I was lacking the basic human quality of being a person who progresses through time as a straight, seamless, continuous line. I tried to keep my conversations, sensations and moments locked between my palms – a fierce grasp that would prevent the slip.
But that’s not how life functions, and it’s not how minds function either. Most of my experience is in between. The ‘before’ I recognize, and the ‘after’ I always return to, and the slight dissonance that occurs each time I step back. The world has continued its orbit; people have gone on finishing sentences they began before my departure; time has maintained its steadiness and its orderly march for the rest of the universe. Yet I step back into what feels like a movie I’ve temporarily walked out of and no one has hit the pause button.
I used to be terribly ashamed of this state. Like I was a fundamentally inadequate human who couldn’t even do the fundamental task of simply being-or of inhabiting the present, or being “present” in the way others always seemed to be. Slowly, through conversation, through reading, through hours sitting silently in rooms with minds that knew the language of such experience, I have begun to learn something new: that our identity isn’t merely formed by what we remember, but by who we are when we come back.
Doctors may talk of “continuity of consciousness.” What they seldom emphasize is the degree of plasticity this continuity possesses: that it is flexible, it can stretch, it can thin out and it can ripple. And none of that has the effect of rendering any person any less whole-it merely suggests that an individual’s experience of time is textured in a somewhat different fashion. Some days I am perfectly situated within the here and now; other days I am just off center, feeling almost an observer in the midst of my own existence. Then there are other days when I am reconstructing, piecing things together from various, disparate fragments and constructing a sense of my own history. But even in the act of reconstruction, there is something steady underneath-a constant return.
I am learning that wholeness doesn’t require unbrokenness. It doesn’t necessitate perfect recall or the same linear experience of time that others possess. To be whole is simply to re-find oneself each time one returns. It is to trust that even when the thread unravels slightly, it has not snapped entirely. We describe mental, and often physical health in black and white terms: stable versus unstable; present versus absent; well versus ill. The truth of being appears far more complex. It’s more about intervals, or rhythms. It’s about tides. There are moments of clarity; there are intervals where distance feels more prevalent and there are always moments of re-finding. The work I need to do now is probably not about force-fitting myself into a perfect straight line of memory. It’s all about finding my way through the space between the fragments.
It’s about learning to trust my own return.
It’s about trusting that people who care will pick up the pieces for me, and never make me feel like I am failing.
About the Author
Chloe is a writer who loves personal voice and creative writing. She is drawn to honest storytelling and enjoys exploring everyday experiences through clear, expressive, and thoughtful prose.