Self Archaeology

By Jessica Lake

To understand what I mean by Autobiographical Archaeology, you need to know that I divide my life into before and after discovering SDAM.

We do not know what goes on inside someone else’s head.

For most of my life, I simply assumed that when other people used words such as memory, imagination, nostalgia, and recollection, they meant roughly what I meant.

Everyone thinks they are normal.

I was wrong.

From other people I had gathered that memory was something like a home movie.

That was why I knew mine was lossy.

I had almost no memories that resembled movies.

What little imagery I could access was useless for inspection.

No motion.

No sound.

No words.

A flash—

and gone.

My inner voice usually had to tell me what had happened.

Visualizing something was equally hopeless.

Even something as simple as a cube.

For an instant, perhaps something appears.

Then nothing.

I cannot rotate it.

I cannot inspect it.

I cannot hold it there.

When I try to force a mental image, I feel pressure building in my head, as if something is being asked to operate that simply does not.

Since I subscribe to “better safe than sorry,” I do not push often.

Still, lots of people say they have poor memories.

So I did not give mine much thought.

I half-joked that a trauma terrorist was holding my childhood hostage.

Someday all those memories would come flooding back.

I waited patiently.

A lot of things happened.

I became a woman in my seventies and retired.

My mother, brother, and then father died within a few years of one another. I cared for each of them near the end.

After my father died, I collapsed.

Without them, I no longer knew what my purpose was.

At seventy-two I began therapy.

I hoped to work through my grief, stop feeling like an outsider, and perhaps even recover my memories.

Instead, over the next two years, nearly everything I believed about myself changed.

I had already accepted my gender dysphoria and transitioned.

Then came ASD.

Aphantasia.

Childhood trauma.

A grossly dysfunctional family.

And finally my therapist casually said something that shattered what remained of my assumptions about memory.

Apparently many people can, to varying degrees, re-enter an autobiographical memory.

Not merely know that something happened.

Experience some portion of having been there.

What I call temporal bilocation.

One foot in the present.

One in the past.

A memory may return with imagery.

Emotion.

Embodiment.

A sense of ownership.

A person may remember not merely:

I loved her.

But something of what loving her felt like.

Inconceivable.

Not surprising.

Not shocking.

Gobsmacked.

When Lisa explained episodic recollection, time seemed to stop.

Reality became secondary.

And in an instant, a great deal of my life reorganized.

I had thought I understood words such as memory, nostalgia, attachment, and loss.

Apparently I had been using some of them differently.

Forgive me if I romanticize what I learned.

I am a romantic.

When one lover remembers another, the present person may be joined by something of the accumulated past:

a touch,

a conversation,

a reconciliation,

a summer,

a kindness,

a wound.

The remembered relationship can have temporal depth.

Mine does not work that way.

I cannot ordinarily relive an autobiographical episode.

I cannot summon an old emotion and inhabit it again.

I live something embodied once.

Then it is gone.

What remains afterward is predominantly knowing.

Knowing that water freezes at 32°F.

Knowing that I loved someone.

Knowledge is knowledge.

Some of it happens to be about me.

That distinction changed everything.

For decades I thought I had a defective version of ordinary autobiographical memory.

Now I understood that I was often doing something else entirely.

Reconstruction.

A semantic reconstruction is not a recovered memory.

It is an inferred model assembled from surviving evidence.

A table.

A classroom.

A child at a desk.

No emotional atmosphere.

No internal narration.

No felt continuity.

Only fragments.

Properties.

Relationships.

Knowledge.

I know that I feared school intensely.

But when I examine that statement today, I do not re-enter the fear.

I know the fear existed.

That is different.

And once I understood that difference, another problem appeared.

How do I write an autobiography about a life I cannot revisit?

The closest analogy I have found is archaeology.

Imagine reconstructing an ancient civilization from broken pottery, scattered bones, foundation stones, surviving documents, and fragments of art.

You can infer a great deal.

You can identify patterns.

You can construct models.

You can sometimes infer the transformation that connects one surviving state to another.

But reconstruction always contains uncertainty.

That is important.

Because my mind strongly prefers coherence.

Give it two fragments and it wants the bridge between them.

Give it a contradiction and it wants a resolution.

Give it an unexplained state change and it wants the transformation.

That capacity is extraordinarily useful.

It is also dangerous.

The danger is not necessarily falsehood.

The danger is manufactured precision.

A coherent story can contain details for which no surviving evidence exists.

The reconstruction becomes smoother than the archaeology warrants.

So I have had to learn a discipline.

What do I actually know?

What evidence survives?

What is inference?

What is merely possible?

How far am I from the evidence?

What other transformation could produce the same result?

Can I run the candidate forward?

Can I run it backward?

Does it survive both directions?

The farther I move from surviving evidence, the lower my confidence should become.

Not because reconstruction is worthless.

Because reconstruction is not recollection.

I am not recovering the past.

I am modeling it.

That distinction has become especially important in understanding childhood.

For years I described many of my adult behaviors as the result of rules learned under duress.

I imagined punishment installing instructions into me.

I now think that was too passive.

The punishments were constraints.

The child adapted.

Faced with an environment she could neither escape nor control, perhaps she generated solutions something like these:

Do not depend.

Do not expose need.

Become useful.

Avoid disapproval.

Reduce the footprint.

I cannot know exactly what she thought or how she arrived there.

What I do know is that some solutions worked.

So they stabilized.

Decades later, the original episodes were inaccessible to me.

The adaptations remained.

Without provenance, they no longer felt like childhood solutions.

They felt like reality.

That is exactly the sort of thing Autobiographical Archaeology must reconstruct carefully.

I cannot return to six years old and ask what happened.

I can examine what survived.

The declarations.

The behaviors.

The punishments I know occurred.

The later configuration.

Then I can ask:

What transformation plausibly connects them?

That answer is never a recovered memory.

It is a model.

Perhaps a very good one.

Still a model.

This also explains something strange about my autobiographical knowledge.

The conclusion can survive after its derivation has disappeared.

I know things about myself without knowing when I learned them.

I know that certain environments frightened me.

I know that certain people mattered.

I know that certain adaptations governed decades of my life.

But the episodes from which that knowledge arose are largely gone from my reach.

The grapes are gone.

The wine remains.

And over time, even the little fragments seem to lose what emotional residue they once carried.

They become increasingly conceptual.

Perhaps, in the end, there is only understanding.

Or perhaps only theory.

That is why I remain cautious whenever I write about my past.

I can reconstruct.

I can infer.

I can constrain.

I can sometimes arrive at an explanation that fits remarkably well.

But I cannot climb inside the excavation and pretend it is the original city.

I do not excavate memories.

I excavate remnants suggesting how someone might once have lived.

That someone was me.