Why I write

     To be frank, I have pretty bad memory problems. It's part of the reason why I write, even if I don't necessarily realize it most of the time. When I write, sometimes things appear in my writing I had forgotten or I write situations out as I see them in a snippet of memory, and it sometimes works out. Other times, my peers and family will read through a story of essay and say, "Don't you remember when...?"

     Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

     To my classmates, this is why I was weird all those years.

     When I was seven, I moved to Cody. Several months after, I began seeing a counselor and he told my mother I had PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder. Usually it's something soldiers have when they come back from a warzone. I wasn't really sure what that meant at the time. I guess I was too distracted by these glass wands he had. One thing I can remember is they were filled with glitter and stars and shone when you held them up to the light. We didn't realize at the time what it meant for me. Besides the emotional relapses I'd go through, I apparently seemed to be a normal kid. 

     I don't remember much about being a normal kid.

     The thing about the entire time I was growing up was I was the kid who acted weird and had the weird name. That's about all I can remember from that time period. Most psychologists say memory loss is a sign of repression of bad memories. It seems to me I remember most of the bad stuff and forget everything else. As I went through elementary school, I think I told some pretty wild stories about my life back in Casper. I realize I probably did that because I was afraid to remember that I couldn't remember, so I made up slightly probable stories so my classmates wouldn't think I was more of a freak than I already was.

    I didn't realize I was missing large chunks of memory until I was in sixth grade. Something stupid popped up in my head one day, something from an old cartoon I used to watch. I couldn't remember the name of the character or anything about the show and it frustrated me. Then slowly, I realized I couldn't really remember anything about living back in Casper. To be honest, I flipped. I could remember nearly everything academic I had learned, but I had huge 'blanks' in my memory about my life. My mother wanted to say it was normal, but she and I figured out pretty quickly it was a side effect of PTSD. She encouraged me to trawl back through my memories to try to find what I was missing, but it didn't do me any good. Memories seemed to come and go as they pleased, sometimes in the middle of a social studies class. It helped to have a computer in middle school, because if it was something I was interested in back then, I could just put it in a search engine and go. Other times, it'd be something only I could know, a personal experience.

     I lost another chunk of memory between eighth grade and my freshman year when faced with a really screwed up event that year. It may have been gradual, but for me, it was like waking up one morning and knowing, just knowing, that I had forgotten it all again. Thanks to my friends and the low stress situation at home, I managed to scramble and piece a lot together again, so there's only minimal blanks, mostly surrounding my middle school years. My elementary years became foggier. 

    

    It's a fair question to ask, "Don't you forget as you get older?" You do. Many people do. I just thought that summer it was pretty weird when I couldn't remember a few months before very clearly. My situation feels like I'm an old man looking for his teeth when they're in his mouth. His mouth is numb and he is blind. If he could reach up and touch his mouth, he'd be able to feel the teeth. He wouldn't be able to describe them to you, but they would be there. 

     I took the opportunity my freshman year to rebuild myself, as a lot of people do when they get into high school. The problem remained with getting back a little bit to person I was before, without being the extremist I was about certain issues. When I looked back to that girl in middle school, I saw a selfish, moody girl with huge anger problems along with obsession issues. It's like looking at a completely different person and trying to project their personality onto yourself. It was a long road. My newly acquired debate mentors, one of whom became my best friend later on, thought I was pretty weird. I was pretty weird. I stuck pretty close to them that year, trying to create a safe environment for myself as I rebuilt myself out of scattered, colorful legos that were scattered all over the floor. I sought to become a kinder, better person out of the blank personality that I had. It was hard. Occasionally I'd act way too much like the old me, the old judgmental and hateful person I was.

    There's not a lot to say about the years in between then and now. Elementary has become a lot fuzzier, to the point that I maybe have five distinct memories. Maybe that's normal. I was worried about freshman and sophomore year earlier this month, but my parents and I are trying to stable out my diet and see if it helps at all. I've got a lot of factors against me right now. I was born with a genetic B12 and iron deficiency, something that's really prevalent in my family. Vitamin B12 controls the balances in your ears, but it can also mess with your memory if you aren't careful. I obtained a brain injury freshman year during Homecoming. Yearbook managed to forever memorialize my marred face at the dance that year. While nothing initially showed up on the MRI and CT scans after my wreck, it was obvious I had a concussion and for months afterword, I had migraines. There's the ever present PTSD. I mostly don't have a problem with it anymore, but occasionally it rears its ugly head.

    Things still get fuzzy sometimes. Stress gets to me and it feels like my head has been shaken really hard and everything's fallen of the shelves. My friend, one of those debate mentors, mentioned to me that I had told him about joining Equus a total of 18 times in one week, the week before finals. He was a little worried. I figured it was minor, compared to everything else.

    I'm a pretty normal person, or I'd like to think I am. I'm trying to be proactive about managing stress and my food, hoping it'll eventually get better, and that the old man will be able to see his teeth again someday. I'm going to get it checked out again as soon as I'm 18 and move my records to my new doctor. I've got other appointments lined up with therapists, and hopefully, I'll be able to have a plan for how to handle this by the time I go to college. 

    This is why I write.