I have always had a terrible memory. I often joke that my best friend is my memory; now and then she’ll ask if I remember a moment from our teenage years or early 20s, to which I’ll always respond, No, but I believe you. I am grateful that she remembers so much of what we’ll one day call “our youth,” but dismayed whenever I can’t relive the bubbly laughter, bewilderment, or melodramatic high school emotion that she so easily calls to mind.
A few months ago, I shared this with my therapist, and she frowned. “A poor memory is often a marker of a terrible childhood,” she said. But I shook my head. My childhood wasn’t abrasive enough for my brain to want to scrub itself clean. The problem, I posited, was that I never paid sufficient attention to anything. I was always focused on whatever was going to come next.
I’m doing that now on my couch. It’s New Year’s Eve, and the living room is dimly lit, a jazz compilation playing on the TV. I’ve brewed myself a cup of hazelnut black tea in anticipation of our late night out, but it’s over-steeped; I forgot about it a minute after dunking the bag into the hot water, having mentally moved on to the next task (whatever that was). Everything I do is simply a way of biding my time until the next thing, which will serve as a waiting room activity for what follows.
Is this a survival strategy? Maybe. In high school, when my relationship with one parent really began to deteriorate, I convinced myself that I just needed to make it to graduation, after which I could move to Arizona (where I’d spent my early years) and form a life of my own choosing. Through college, as I worked a very intense full-time job and took a full slate of classes (often while also working freelance gigs on the side), I told myself that I just needed to make it to graduation, after which I could finally slow down and start living. Then, after graduation and the implosion of my planned career in federal law enforcement (lol), I told myself that I needed to hustle to build the writing career that the world had always implied was unrealistic and unsustainable. After that was settled, I could hopefully afford to stop and smell the roses.
But here I am, with most of the life I yearned for as a teenager—a loving partner, a home I own, a career I’m good at and enjoy, plenty of friends, a published book, and two cats who are my whole world—plus more, and I still insist on rushing ahead. Part of me thinks this is because I am constantly convinced I don’t have “enough time”; a few years ago, after breaking free of long-term suicidal ideation and realizing that I did indeed want to live for a while, I developed a fear that, out of a cruel sense of irony, the universe would kill me off earlier than I newly wanted. In a way, I feel that I’m on borrowed time. If I want to publish another book or buy rural property in my favorite desert town (my most frivolous but stubborn dream), I’d better do it quick.
But if I don’t break this pattern, another year will pass with little conscious memory to accompany it. While scrolling through my camera roll for photos to add to the collage above, I came across moments I’d completely forgotten about: one of the most incredible dinners of my life in upstate New York; fostering two rambunctious orange kittens; surprise fireworks while my friends and I were at the pool. If you had asked me pre-scroll what my 2025 was like, I probably would have mentioned my authorial debut or the part-time job I desperately wanted, got, and then left six months later. The “big” stuff.
Intellectually, I know that life is not just a collection of the type of events that end up on one’s Wikipedia page: it’s also what happens in between. The best days of my life so far were not the ones in which I got into my alma mater, moved to Arizona, bought my house, or earned my first publishing deal. They’re ones in which the universe served up seemingly small yet pleasant surprises, and I had the awareness required to recognize just how lucky I was to experience them.
Emotionally, though, it’s hard to convince myself to slow down. I see in the news that a young person has died in a terrible and unexpected way, and my anxious brain reminds me: That could be you next time. Better hurry up. Or I finish a book, flip it over to read the author’s bio, and realize that they are roughly my age, only to ask myself why, unlike them, I haven’t yet managed to land in the Paris Review and secure a literary agent. It’s this cycle that urges me to push fast-forward, desperate to get to “the good parts” so at least I’ll know they’re there at all.
But this is the good part, I tell myself on the couch. There’s a quiet, calming sort of magic in allowing these moments in between to illuminate how my cats play with each other, how the shrimp dance across the gravel in my little aquarium, or how impeccably my boyfriend cuts the chives that go on top of our dinner. Don’t these details lend texture to a life, too?
I’m two days into the new year when I finish writing this post. As 2025 gave way to 2026, it began to rain, with a smattering of showers appearing throughout the first day of the new year. I can’t help but assume such timely rain is a good omen here in the desert, and when I head out for a boxing session, I notice that the air smells like creosote, though the nearest mountain preserve is a few miles away. The resilient plant’s scent lingers as I run a few post-workout errands, infusing urban Phoenix with the quintessential aroma of desert rain. With every item I cross off my to do list, I challenge myself to take a deep breath and remember that moment.
Is the Walgreens parking lot a Wikipedia-worthy place? Is the post office? No. But I want to remember them anyway.
This is the first entry in the as-yet unnamed blog section of Creativity Under Capitalism, where I’ll publish occasional personal and/or lifestyle-oriented posts. If that’s your thing, I’m happy to have you! If it’s not, you can unsubscribe from this section without losing your subscription to Creativity Under Capitalism.
I fear that we might share the exact same brain. There really is such an intense anxiety when you’ve finally come out of suicidal ideation and you realize that death is actually a very real and very scary thing (I’m working through this with my therapist rn so that line felt like a personal attack, thanks Adrianna!!!!!).
I remember once last year I had a full on breakdown because I realized that I never enjoyed anything I was doing in the moment, because I could only think about the next thing. Even things I enjoyed were checking off the box, and I found that even on trips or at dinners I was thinking things like “this is almost over, time for the next thing” or sometimes “I can’t wait for this to be over, I can’t wait to sleep and think about how great this was later”.
Not to continue to beat my dead horse, but journalling freely about things, especially visually, has really helped with my memory! I take my little business cards and trash and get little stickers and write about it. Somehow it makes me feel more present in it.
Either way, I hope you find your time to slowdown and remember!! Life is all the little things. This was a really beautiful post and I look forward to more blog like posts from you 😉