Memory

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?

Before I do the meditation, I will go to travel wherever I want to go and I think it will calm me down before I start my recovery process. After that I will definitely go and visit the places that I had been visited all the time. I think the first place I want to go to trigger my brain to recall all those memories I had is my high school. I had spent 5 years in the school and high school has been always a memorable place in my heart and it really means a lot to me. I will try to approach to the teachers who had taught me before and try to have a really nice conversation with them in order to find out more about myself. I think I will turn to my family next although I may not recognize them at all. I will ask my parents and siblings to write me a book that describes my childhood and I will read it every time before I go to sleep. I hope after reading some of the interesting event that happened to me, I can remember some of the facts through my dream. I do hope I can perform lucid dreaming too so I can trace back the memories as soon as possible in a way. Besides, I would try to figure out who used to be my best friends and they are more likely to help me to get back those memories because I know it’s normal to spend more time with our best friends than our families during our adolescence.

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 would feel upset and depressed all the time because I know recalling things had never been easy. I might be an introvert and try to move against people or maybe move away from people. I would hide my feelings too because I might feel embarrassed when I can’t remember certain facts that are really important in my life. Perhaps I would find the reconstruction process to be too toilsome and started to give up in a way. I definitely need someone who really understand me to guide and me all the time when I were almost wanted to give up something.

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, , etc. Please elaborate and explain some your decision making process.

Maybe it sounds a little bit bizarre, I would want to retain all of the memories that I used to have. Happy memories, sad memories, negative, painful, happy, angry, frightened and etc are equally important to me. If I only remembered the best part of them, I would live in a false state for the rest of my life. Life never gets perfect and I believe those little imperfections in our lives indeed make our lives more interesting. Don’t you think so? For those negative memories, I would try not to think of them that often but they should not be eliminated because they are still experience for me and I think they are useful in shaping a better me.