Retracing The Steps

For this reflection, imagine that you were unexpectedly struck by a falling object, which caused you to experience retrograde amnesia. As we learned, retrograde amnesia is the loss of memories which occurred before the brain injury. In this case, imagine this accident has caused you to forget all your explicit memories from childhood up until you were struck by the falling object.

Luckily, a medication has been developed to help you recover your memories, but it’s up to you to guide the recovery process.

1. How would you begin the process of recovering your memory? Who would you turn to, where would you search, and how would you proceed?

To begin the process of recovering all of the memories lost from before the accident, I would probably start by looking at all of the picture albums dedicated to me, my friends, and my family, in chronological order. I would also try to look at pictures of important events in world history that occurred throughout my life to that point. After all, we take pictures to preserve memories, so why not use them to actually fill the giant memory gap. Then, I would try to talk to friends and family to try to recount past events. I would listen to stories of my upbringing and their histories as well. Basically, I think that I would need to expose myself to as many people who have had an impact on my life prior to the accident as possible. This would probably help me piece together the past most effectively. Lastly, I think that visiting the places that I would normally visit would be crucial as well.

2. Please describe the emotional journey you imagine you would be going through as you attempt to reconstruct your life. Imagine the feelings you would have.

I suppose that the journey of recollecting one’s memories after retrograde amnesia caused by an accident is absolutely devastating. Once you understand that your mind is a blank slate, and that all these years of precious experience are gone, a depressive mood would probably set in. Of course, as I would be looking through all the pictures and talking to family, friends, and acquaintances, I think that all of the situations would be very emotionally charged. There would probably be tears of joy, as well as tears of sadness. There would be laughter at the funnier moments in life as well. All in all though, it seems as if the journey to recount everything would be extremely daunting. How does one go back to living a normal life? You cannot recount absolutely everything, like restoring a backed up hard drive. I think that this depressive feeling of knowing that life will never be the same, and that years of memories were wasted, will be the dominant feeling when living with retrograde amnesia.

3. Suppose you were able to pick and choose the memories you wanted to recover from your life. What types of memories would you choose to retain and what types of memories might you decide to edit out of your remembered experience? Positive, negative, painful, happy, angry, frightened, etc. Please elaborate and explain some your decision making process.

Thinking about what kind of experiences make me the person I am today, I realize that picking only the positive and happy experiences to recover from my life would not be the right way to go about this. After all, there is a reason that idioms such as, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, exist. Negative times in my life have certainly helped shape the person that I am today, and the positive played a part as well. Considering that in 21 years of life, I have retained more memories than I can obviously think of at any given moment, I would like to recover all of them. In the course of life, I believe that everything that happens to us forms us into the individuals we are today. Therefore, editing would be unnecessary.