How can you remember?

I found it interesting how many friends and family asked the same question of me when they read my book Soft Underbelly.

“How can you remember so much from such a long time ago?”

I had one very obvious answer to their question.  “How do I forget?”

There were so many terrible and traumatic events that have happened to me throughout my life.  The scars they have left behind cannot be seen to the naked eye, but they are there.  They have accompanied me all my life.

Remembering was the easy part, forgetting is proving to be much more difficult.

Once I had made the decision to write my story I struggled, where do I start?  My earliest memory was when I was four years old, and like the king said in Alice in Wonderland, “start at the beginning and go on till you come to the end then stop.”  And that is what I did.

Unlike repressed memory which is a memory that has been unconsciously blocked and the mind pushes it into some inaccessible corner, my memories of the first most traumatic event that I can recall would play out for me like a silent movie in my head.

I started typing, the memories playing out for me as though it had only happened yesterday, and the details so vivid that it took my breath away.  The pain so real I could feel it in my throat.  I had to remind myself to breath.  I had to tell myself that I was safe.  Nothing could hurt me anymore.

But the tears fell, I cried a lot while writing this book.  Sometimes I howled like a wounded animal.  There were times that the mere act of punching words on my keyboard was so difficult for me to do I had to ask a friend to type while I told the story.

Yes the writing of Soft Underbelly was cathartic for me.  A healing of my past through cleansing my consciousness.