Knowledge Is Knowledge

By Jessica Lake

I am beginning to suspect that I have made the same mistake with autobiography that I once made with memory, intuition, and imagination.

I assumed everyone meant what I meant.

Below is an example:

Neurotypical:

Memory → episodic recall

Neurodiverse:

Memory → semantic reconstruction

I now think that autobiographical knowledge is not privileged in my mind.

For most people, autobiography is conveyed in episodic memory. Those people revisit prior events of their lives. The subsystem gives idiosyncratic knowledge a privileged status.

I do not have that.

What I possess are declarative statements.

I was born in 1952.

I studied engineering.

I transitioned.

I have SDAM.

Those statements are no different, in kind, from knowing how evolution works or why a finite-state machine succeeds. Same kind of knowledge—different subject.

Knowledge is knowledge.

Some of it happens to be about me.

Because of that, I do not measure my growth by the accumulation of personal experiences.

I measure it by the accumulation of understanding.

And suddenly I understand something else.

Why have I spent my entire life trying to learn?

As a little boy, I wanted to know everything.

At eighteen, just out of high school, I announced that I was going to learn everything there was to know.

When that ambition proved somewhat impractical, I amended it.

I never said I was going to learn everything.

I said I was going to learn everything important.

It was a joke.

Perhaps it wasn’t.

I don’t remember my tenth birthday.

But I remember that fire burns.

The birthday happened to me and disappeared.

What I learned remained.

Perhaps that is why learning has always mattered so much to me.

Learning is one of the ways my life leaves something behind.

An experience may disappear. The afternoon may disappear. The classroom may disappear. The person who taught me may disappear.

But if I learned something?

Tomorrow I know something I did not know today.

Something accumulated.

I grew.

I could not have understood this as a little boy. I could not have understood it at eighteen.

But perhaps I had already discovered the behavior long before I understood the reason.

Learn.

Keep learning.

Because knowledge remains.

If today I understand something I did not understand yesterday, then I have grown.

It does not matter whether that knowledge concerns neurology, engineering, Shakespeare, or myself.

Progress is knowledge.

Knowledge is my continuity.

That is how my life accumulates.