I’m reading through the suitcase of memories – well, not ‘through’, I stop and stare into space and rootle around for more of something. There are some letters from a girl with whom I had a brief encounter. My whole pre-suitcase memory of that was: I Did her Wrong, she wrote angrily to me, I didn’t reply, I was a Rat with Women.
The reality conveyed by the letters is completely different. Seems I did write, and here’s part of the response:
Believe me, I’ve no regrets, only a great deal of happiness to look back on.
There are more letters. Seems also that I was exploring the possibility of leaving for her city – permanently? – and although she was now involved with someone else, she was busy organising a job and somewhere to stay. Kindness and care, when all I had remembered was rage and betrayal.
No need to go into the psychodynamics of that, which are familiar enough. It’s typical of depressive thinking. In deep depression, as many of us know, we are the worst villains that ever crawled between earth and heaven, everything in our past is a crock of shit. When depression is under control, which mine mostly is, that’s easy enough to understand and to watch out for. Even when you’re some way down, you can say to yourself, here come the demons again, they’ll pass, the lying twisters. A measure of deep depression is the complete loss of that perspective.
That’s the general picture. But there’s a somewhat more subtle difficulty. In health you know damn well that you’re just another everyday sinner, and you can look at the past without falling over backwards. Just under the surface of your memories, though, there are these engraved patterns, and unless something jogs you to revisit them, there they stay. This is in all the textbooks – that you’re supposed to ‘work through the implications’ of your condition. I guess that’s what people in interminable therapy are trying to do.
For many years, I’ve carried around this little chunk of guilt quite needlessly. How many more are there? Instead of a suitcase, how I wish now I had a roomful of stuff.