Trying to Understand a Life I Can't Remember

I triangulate befores & afters from evidence of a life, but I'm more Yin/Yang than that

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I publish two different newsletters/columns—one began as a chronicle of caring for Ma while she drifts into the ever-darkening hole of dementia, the other an exploration of my years as a hoochy-cooch girl in Times Square (being a subset of what I affectionately refer to as “The Lost Years”).

Am I a former hellcat turned ministering angel?
A lost child grown into caring elder?
A slutty¹ girl now a celibate senior?
The drunk & drugged years fading as my clean & dry anniversaries overtake my using history?

Befores & afters are clean comparisons, a sharp delineation.

A typical narrative story arc has a climax, an incident or revelation that turns the narrator from that into this. But, I’m not sure any life can be bisected so easily—If can’t draw a line in the sand with the old me on one side, the new me on the other, how do I pinpoint what changed? And when?

I’ve got a memory disorder² from childhood trauma. I’ve learned to compensate, but it’s hard to stay present, be in my body and record memories. I struggle with dates and time spans, so I keep and reference physical & digital records, and in general conversation I extrapolate dates and ages with before/after scenarios. Events are markers more than they are memories; I use them to understand the order things happen, attaching and memorizing dates & time frames where I’m able.

A thing is always before X or after Y. Correlation may not prove causation, but it’s better than nothing.

The Xs & Ys can be highs, lows or in-betweens. I don’t need to actually remember an event if know the date, high school graduation (1974) for example—I don’t know if I went, if I walked, if I had a cap and gown, if there was a party. But whatever happened, I know it was 1974.

Xs & Ys can be

• incidents—sex, first job, sobriety (1990), rape(s);

• time spans—the circus years, the East Village (1979-1997), Brooklyn (1997-2007);

• locations—57th Street, Oakland, Seattle, Indiana, this job, that job, grad school;

• people— a particular boyfriend(s), death(s), meeting (fill in the blank); and

• miscellaneous things that changed life in some way—cocaine, heroin, near death experiences, broken bone(s), publishing, retirement, Mom moving in (2018)…

Like an IFTTT³ automation:

• If this was before working on National Lampoon’s Class of ‘86, then I was 29 or younger;

• If I was in Wabash, then I was with Gabe, so I was a hoochy girl;

• If it was Oakland, then I was with the Indian, then it was a few months between 1980-1983, then I was still drinking;

• If it was Spain then I was sober, so after 1990, and so on.

The point is, life isn’t a before & after, it’s a continuum.

I haven’t had a drink in almost 35 years, but I was completely nuts for the first seven of those years, and not much better for the seven that followed. Putting down the drink and the drugs was less a turning point than it was a slow pivot that took years. My behaviors changing only when they became too painful to continue without the obliteration of being drunk.

Sobriety hasn’t been a straight line, it’s been a dance. Two steps forward, one step back, a sobriety cha-cha.

Sober, I went back to school with the intent to do good, of becoming a teacher—tuition paid courtesy of slinging booze to underage kids in clubs, strip joints, and stealing cash from coatcheck jobs. Boinking coked-out bikers at 4am after the bars closed. Nights on the streets and bars of Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen, stalking a pimp who done me wrong decades ago.

That was me, minus booze and drugs, for the first bunch of years.

The line between then and now is less a line than it is a gradient.

That doesn’t quite capture it either. Gradient implies an ultimate goal, a prescribed direction gradually transitioning from one place to another. Perhaps I’m a multipoint gradient.

Who decided life was a straight shot from here to there, anyway?

Growing up, there were two generally accepted paths:

1. school > marriage & children > death, or

2. school > steps up a ladder > success in your chosen field > death.

Some of us deviated.
Some of us weren’t given handbooks for either of those things.
Some of us just …floundered, ricocheted, freestyled.

A ministering angel and compassionate caregiver—with desires that’d be punishable offenses if I acted on them.

Empathetic and concerned as I am to the pain and struggle of others—I have unpopular pragmatic world views I don’t share publicly. On the rare occasion I have, with the caveat of I’m glad I’m not in charge of the world, the response is always, The world is glad you’re not in charge of the world.

I write in one place about the good me, the evolved me, the compassionate me. The angel on my shoulder.

In the other, the Lost Years, the darker side of me. Actually, the Loster side of me. That’s a word now, I made it a word. Conjugate with me: Lost. Loster. Lostest.

Yet, even those years I look back on and tell you I wasn’t a good person then, wasn’t kind or caring—they turn out not to be completely dark when I talk to people who were there with me.

Andrea was a runaway, maybe 17 when I accompanied her for an abortion. I was probably 25. I took her back to my apartment and made Jewish penicillin aka chicken soup from scratch while she rested. I called her mother⁴ to assure her everything was okay. At the time, Andrea and I were topless dancers working in the biggest club in the city, drinking and drugging as much as we could.

I don’t remember that at all, not even after Andrea reminded me when we reconnected decades later. I was surprised, it’s not how I remember myself, it’s not who I thought I’d been.

I’m just now understanding the Yin Yang of me—maybe of all of us—dark containing a touch of light, the light retains a spot of dark. A duality—opposites that complement & attract, feeding into each other, birthing and rebirthing each other.

Within each version of me, another exists, has existed.

There is no beginning or ending, just a constant rebalancing. No definitive me then/me now, but perpetual motion like the tides, the seasons, life & death.

When I try to pin down the absolute me of a time and place, I’m trapped, like an insect in amber. A relic that’s not the truth, but just a moment in time, a singularity. To understand a life, choices, and motivations, one needs to stand back, observe & record, beginning to end, consider the environment, the challenges and threats.

I’m worrying the cracks in the amber encasement of cultural labels, justifications and self-judgements. A prison of beliefs that assumes there’s only one version of my story, one truth when there are multiple, nuanced versions.

I buried layers of truth outside my castle walls in an attempt to protect myself.

I built armor that kept me safe for decades, but when the fight was over, I found I’d made myself a prisoner.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) - Song of Myself, 51 - Walt Whitman

Thank you, as always my lovelies, for your eyeballs & your time.

I take neither for granted. If you’d like to show your support you can like, share, restack, or subscribe to my posts. Or you can Buy Me a Coffee, a nice way of putting a little (or not so little) noncommittal financial support into the tip jar.

1. I own that today. I wouldn’t slut shame anyone and I don’t think I have a lot of shame, if any, around my own promiscuity, rather I have compassion and understand it as a simple quest of someplace to feel wanted and loved.

2. What are the Five Types of Dissociative disorders. Of these, I fall mostly under the depersonalization umbrella, although there is a level of amnesia. I’ve accepted both of these things and developed coping skills, hence, the record keeping since 4th grade.

3. If This, Then That

4. Who, as a matter of record, did not seem to be looking for her, at all.