The Memory Game: Self-Deception in Love and Loss
I wish I could forget and I wish I could remember
To the deep thinkers,
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I've had a tenuous relationship with my memory for most of my life. You could say I have a bad memory. I feel that it veers more toward a selective one.
The bits and pieces I "choose" to remember have long painted pictures and narratives that have only served to keep me shackled to an identity that feels safe. They've played on a constant loop, reminding me of what I've lost: the moments I didn't appreciate when they were happening; the love I was given but met with indifference; the justifications I leaned on to keep things as they were—more worried about an uncertain future than the comforts of a dysfunctional present.
Our memories are so complex, and how they shape our personal identities and emotional experiences is, in itself, a form of internal and sometimes existential conflict.
I used to think that I forgot things, key moments, and conversations, because I was simply forgetful. But I see now that my selective memory is a survival mechanism. It is my shield, but one that has often taken on a life of its own.
Maybe this shield has served to protect me from the anguish of past events, too intense to relive. Maybe that has been its purpose this entire time—as if there is a protector within who understands what will break us, and prevents us from prying those doors open.
And still I wonder.
I wonder as I reflect on each stage of my life, the friends that are no longer around or the relationships I’ve let burn asunder—what has this selective memory cost me?
If forgetting is mercy and remembering is power, what does it mean when our minds choose which truths to preserve and which to discard?
The memory game
Lately, I've been obsessed with the song Memory Game by the artist Col3trane. This obsession isn't accidental—it's the soundtrack to the very struggle I'm describing.
The lyrics, so beautiful and so sad, spoke to me in a way that's difficult to explain. The melancholic guitar strings serve as the foundation of a solemn and serene track, meant to bring the listener along for a journey down memory lane.
I hear the lines:
I swear I'm not a fool
But I thought amnesia
Would make it more simple
To lose you
And I can't help but fall into a bed of my own reveries, the kind that are bittersweet. Perhaps, I should say, more bitter than sweet.
These words capture exactly what I've experienced after relationships end: the desperate wish for amnesia, for oblivion, anything to escape the pain of remembering.
I think about how I remained closed off to someone who made me the center of their universe. I took them for granted, and when the damage was done and there was no turning back, the weight of the regret felt unbearable. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't eat. It felt like I couldn't live. In that moment, I would have given anything for the gift of forgetting.
Conventional advice from those who mean well is simply: "Time heals all wounds."
But the longer I live, the more I start to resent this advice, even when it slides off my own tongue as I try my best to comfort others. Time doesn't heal; it merely distances. The wounds don’t go anywhere. They just become easier to ignore. What I truly seek is amnesia. The complete deletion of what I'd lost, because remembering is too painful.
And in that statement alone lies the bigger issue. I close my eyes and wish I could remember better, and paradoxically, with eyes open, the memories I wish would leave me alone continue to haunt me.
Col3trane sings:
I wish I had a pill to get that memory gone
And I, too, wish the same.
The substances and distractions call my name, serving as a false haven, as well as temporary and, more times than not, harmful elixirs. Once the high wears off and reality hits me, the flood that washes over me is often more distressing than when I had to deal with these issues in a lucid state of mind.
It is in trying to run from what happened or in trying to edit and view things through rose-tinted lenses that I empower the darker sides of my memory. The imperfect snapshots and cropped images that I thought were once beautiful are just the selective framing of someone who can't trust his own recounting of events.
This is the memory game—a game of hide and seek with the truth as it actually happened versus the truth that soothes us, that paints the picture we want to see. For those of us who can't ever let things go, who can never shake the past, it is the sadness of living in the shadows of what can't be changed that could drive anyone insane.
The melancholia
Pain is the tormentor that knows no mercy. She bares her fangs, biting and clawing at us over and over again—at best, oblivious to or at worst, indifferent to the wounds she's already left behind. This is why healing is a lifelong journey. If you are alive, you will become very familiar with pain.
But life isn’t all about pain.
When I get lost in a mental maelstrom of my past (which is very, very often), I do see the good times. I can look around at my home right now and recognize the strides I've made in the past five years alone. The present moment is screaming for me to pay attention, to be grateful for how far I've come. And yet, the bad times have left permanent scabs on my soul, which I can't help but pick at.
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu wrote:
"If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present."
Very wise words, ones I desperately wish I could live by. But living in the present feels impossible when the past seems so inescapable. The obsession with things I can’t change, the moments that are done and in the rearview, has me in a bind. This fixation on the past has been, if not the main source, a significant contributor to my depression, my melancholia.
And with the melancholia comes distortions in my memory. The depression was where it all began. Moving on became impossible. Criticism stuck to me like leeches. The more I lived, the more experiences I accumulated—whether positive or negative—the more I noticed that the strands of my selective memory were being manipulated. Before the melancholia, the images of my past could come and go naturally. Now, there is an obsession over some memories and an inability to access others.
According to Harvard Health Publishing, depression doesn't just steal your joy—it chips away at your ability to think clearly. When you're locked in the past, whether haunted by sorrow or chasing a memory of better days, it becomes increasingly difficult to pay attention to the present. Focus fractures, short-term memory suffers, and the mind drifts. This research explains what I've experienced firsthand: why certain memories, especially painful ones, seem so loud, while others become foggy or unreachable. Depression alters not just what we remember, but how we remember.
These memory distortions don't affect all aspects of our lives equally. They play out most dramatically in our closest emotional connections, coloring how we perceive our shared histories and interpret present interactions.
Love, loss, and memory’s distortion
To love and to lose. Love for a person. Love for a place. Love for a time in your life when you were happiest. To lose that love, along with the version of yourself that smiled so wide and with little effort. It all feels like too much to handle, especially because time waits for no one.
As we try to catch our bearings or to make sense of what is happening to us and around us, as we try to look back to see if there is anything worth salvaging, time marches on.
In no other area of my life has this distortion affected me more than in my romantic relationships.
I remember a time when I reconnected with someone after a painful breakup. In my loneliness, I convinced myself that our relationship had been mostly positive, that we could recapture what was lost.
I conveniently erased the constant arguments, the fundamental incompatibilities, the reasons we had separated in the first place. Mere weeks after reconciling, all those conveniently forgotten problems resurfaced with 10x the intensity.
When you're with someone, that relationship serves as an anchor of sorts, a tether to a sense of security. When the relationship ends and we struggle to adjust to what comes after, the justifications start rolling in. Your memory starts doing PR work to ease the loneliness.
But spotlighting only the good and justifying reasons for why something didn't work out, when coalesced with an obsessive and depressed mind, is like walking down a spiral staircase straight to hell. And as you take each step, you find various tools that only serve to feed the delusion.
Self-sabotage or self-protection?
When our reality conflicts with our self-concept or established beliefs, we adjust to reduce the discomfort. This is cognitive dissonance, the sense of unease we feel when we hold beliefs that contradict one another simultaneously, or that don’t line up with what we see play out in reality.
To maintain consistency and reduce the split between what we expected and how things actually are or were, we make justifications or edit events in our minds.
I have experienced this form of dissonance firsthand. After hurting someone through neglect, I struggled for a really long time to reconcile my actions with my self-image as a caring person. Rather than accept that I had been selfish, I constructed elaborate explanations: I was busy; they were too demanding; the timing wasn't right. Over and over again, excuse after excuse, all in the name of protecting the fragile image of Jon I had projected into the world.
Along with cognitive dissonance, nostalgia is constantly hijacking our memories—an insidious trap that can delude even the most coherent among us. In the throes of nostalgia, we remember what aligns with our mood and forget what doesn't. Sometimes, our mental replay of something we imagined—whether our memory is how things truly happened or not—feels vivid and real. And the more we replay these editing scenes, the more real they feel.
As Svetlana Boym puts it:
"One is not nostalgic for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been."
This is where the memory game becomes both self-protection and self-sabotage. To fall prey to a wayward memory is not all bad, I suppose. But in admitting this, we encounter the ultimate dilemma in our struggle with memory—the very paradox I've witnessed within myself. It's our contradictory relationship with memories: feeling simultaneously protected by them and under siege from them.
The forgotten mistakes. The feeling that things were better than they actually were. A blessing and a curse.
I think it’s important to mention here that in some cases, the repression of painful memories can contribute to a person’s quality of life, those with severe PTSD, for instance. But for many of us, our painful memories need to be faced head-on in order to move on.
With the aim to feel better through the self-sabotaging nature of repression, self-reflection becomes a mess. Rather than process, we run. Rather than expose, we hide. I can admit…I run often. I hide just as frequently. I omit and edit how things happened—and so in the mirror of my writing, I must ask myself: If I keep running, if I keep repressing and editing how things happened, how will I grow and learn from the past?
It is in questioning myself in this fashion that I feel I can finally start to engage with my memories in an authentic way.
Remembering honestly
I propose the question once more:
If forgetting is mercy and remembering is power, what does it mean when our minds choose which truths to preserve and which to discard?
I yearn for a clean resolution—one that washes away distress, sadness, and regret. Yet perhaps wisdom lies in embracing the untidiness of memory and searching for the hidden gems within it.
In the end, what matters most is honesty with ourselves. If I truly value my lived experiences, I must seek to remember pivotal moments and emotions as they actually occurred. Otherwise, what lessons can I claim to have learned from a past I've rewritten?
I want to learn from the ruins of my past. To remember my role in the love lost. To remember what led to the decay of something that at one point in time was so beautiful and strong. It is poetic and chaotic—our storage of memories. There is pain. There is also that sense of joy that I wish we could collect in an easily accessible vessel.
It feels like I've been running forever, and I don't want to run anymore. I don't want to be numb anymore. I want to remember, honestly. I want to understand—I mean, truly understand—what brought me to this place in my life. I want to stop trying to fool myself.
To wage war against a selective memory is to understand a paradox: selective memory both frees us and enslaves us. It's the rumination that lays waste to your present. It's the inability to see the nuance or to give ourselves or others grace.
We don't need anything or anyone to help us remove the worst of our memories. We don't need a magic pill to help us cope with the remnants of our past. Instead, we should sit with what we've been through, rather than speeding to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.
It is in confrontation that we find catharsis. Ultimately, perhaps the real victory in the memory game isn't forgetting or selective remembering, but having the courage to remember honestly—pain, joy, mistakes, and all—and still choosing to move forward.
If this essay resonated with you, consider supporting my writing journey! You can ‘buy me a coffee’ using the link below 👇🏾
What I’m into this week:
you could be brilliant...but you're coward. by sms (Substack)
You’ve let the fear of not being perfect keep you from even starting, from pushing yourself to be better. It’s easier to stay in the shadows, to avoid the possibility of failure, than to face the reality that you might not be as brilliant as you once dreamed.
Khalil Gibran on pain:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.
Much love,
- Jon ♾️
In my 70s, new losses piled on top of old ones, and they nearly crushed me. Then it occurred to me: just as the mind has selective memory, and my selective memory was skewed to loss and pain, we also have the ability to forge the narratives of our lives. At my age, that is about the only power left. And yet, it is perhaps the most powerful of the powers. I can see the past in a kaleidoscope of wonder, of comings and goings, of neutral observations that bear neither joy nor pain, of building block on top of building block. Of how I built the journey of "me." I can see the story as fascinating. It's my book to write.
You're not too young to begin working on your own narratives. Let not the world write them for you. Also, just as a tonic to painful memory, Eckhart Tolle has some mighty lessons on how to live life. Don't wait until your old and have no other options to learn these lessons.
Incidentally, your writing is the most inspiring, authentic, and courageous of any I've read. I'm about to pull the trigger on that cup of coffee!
Its one thing to read a piece you relate to that it stirs emotions and memories but this piece transcends that. Reading this, a corner of my unspoken psyche is suddenly acknowledge and seen. I cant put my finger on it but i know all the feels all too well. Definitely will keep thinking about this and reread for deeper contemplation
This is a wonderful piece 🤍