Memory and Autism
Memory
I’ve always thought of myself as having a very good memory. I memorize easily and with complexity. But I also have extremely clear memories of the past. I remember dates, times, places, smells, visual cues, my own emotions, and on and on. So much detail. And with such clarity and feeling.
It has only just sunk in that most people do not experience memory or the past in this way. Most people let go of the past very easily and it doesn’t stay tangled up in their present. These are the people who are constantly telling me that the cure to my depression is to “live in the present.” I don’t actually think that is possible.
It seems clear that this relationship with memory is part of autism and the extra-dense clustering of neurons in the brains. It can make us smart, but it also makes us very difficult. We don’t live in the present the way that other people do. We don’t let go of past hurts or of past delights easily. Or at all. I don’t think I live in the present fully ever. I don’t think I’m ever going to do that. It’s not even a goal of mine anymore. Mostly, I just try to notice that I’m attached to the past and that’s all. Not a judgment or frustration, just acknowledgment.
And acceptance that this is how I am and that this isn’t how everyone on the planet is and that it’s OK to be me and it’s important for me to let other people live in time the way that they live in time. I suspect my obsession with time travel is related to the odd way that I live in time. The past is never really in the past. I’m never not old-Mette and new-Mette at the same time.
Autistic people are said to be rigid and to find change difficult, but I think from my perspective as an autist, the neurotypical way of erasing the past as if it never existed and didn’t matter is so strange. And it’s LYING (I’m shouting this because for an autist, lying is one of the worst possible things that can happen because it’s a denial of reality and that is very, very disturbing). But lying is what neurotypical people do all the time. They eat and breathe and shit lying. That is, they live in a world in which time is so completely different that I can never understand it.
Neurotypical people just let things drop into the memory hole. And I don’t have a memory hole. Autistic people don’t. It’s one of the many ways that forcing us to accept that we’re wrong and that we have to live in the NT world is so, so damaging. Our world is real. Very, very real. And it’s never past.
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/brain-structure-changes-in-autism-explained/