azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 ([personal profile] azurelunatic) wrote2002-09-26 10:45 pm

Weekend plans & how they relate to the grand scheme of life

(inspired by an entry of [livejournal.com profile] wolfieboy's)


So why do I post about my silly daily activities, when I'm going to be re-reading this journal in years to come?

I date the things that happen in my life by events, and when they happen in relation to them. I can remember that on the day that I had X lifechanging experience, y and z also happened, but I couldn't pin it down to the calendar other than a season, perhaps. But I know that it happened before n, but after q.

As silly as they may look, my day-to-day events, the things I consider normal and everyday, say a lot about me and my mental state. What do I do every day? What do I think about classes, about my friends, about my beloveds? How many of me are there in here? What are their names? Who do I talk to? What do I read? (at the moment, LotR: The Two Towers, Dracula, and I'm contemplating the outside cover of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (I think that's the title...)) How do I dress? What have I been saying to my mother?

These are all the things that make me who I am. That changes, day to day, and over time as well. In order to have any of my deep thoughts or sudden epiphanies make sense, I need to know who I was when I thought them, or experienced life-changing events.

There's far too much going on in my mind for me to process at one time; when it's happening, I'm too busy happening in it to go into the necessary depth of analysis that I need to do to bits of my life to keep myself sane within them. This, first and foremost, is a journal for me. In order to figure out my life, I need to remember it, as near to all of it as I can.

One of my not-so-secret terrors is the loss of my mind. The loss of my intellectual facilities is the first and foremost fear, but as a very close second place comes the loss of my memory, the forgetting of who I am, and more importantly, why. Simon Illyan's predicament in Memory terrifies me. Cryo-amnesia, from Mirror Dance, terrified me. A people who do not know history are doomed to repeat it; a person who cannot remember their own history may face a similar problem.

I'm no longer quite so scared of memory loss as I was, actually. I lose bits of things from school all the time. It's normal, and not a problem. One of the deepest roots of the terror of memory loss is the not remembering the people I love. But if I should lose my memory, yet remain myself, would it not logically follow that I regain some of the loved ones that I don't remember? If it was their better personal qualities that drew me towards them and made me care for them, if they are still the same essential people who I loved, and they still care for me, I should learn to come to love them again. We would not have the same history together, the new self and them, but we would still be friends. They could connect me to the person who I was.