But for them…it was Tuesday

A mini-revelation today was that, as much as I hold on to images and memories from my past, they usually mean next to nothing to the other people involved, especially if the consequences were negative to me. The perspectives that I hold of events from my younger self are not only NOT shared by others involved in them but they sometimes have no significance to those people, no matter how profoundly I was affected.

To elaborate…

Last year I published a memoir of my time at secondary school, called 6 of One. The book was me and 27 other ex-pupils of Kenilworth School, UK talking about the place with stories ranging from funny to soul-destroyingly depressing. While working on the submissions for the book I was contacted by a guy who used to bully me at school. And he bullied me badly. He enquired about if I’d had a miserable time at the place and then wrote the immortal line “but you and me were mates, weren’t we?”. When I pointed out that I’d lived most of my 4 years at the school afraid of him, he had no memory of it. He also didn’t remember me working in a pub in our hometown a few years after we left school, even though I worked under two different licensees and for a total of about 4 months, and served him beer every night I worked there.

The experiences I had had with and because of him were, for him, stuff he didn’t even remember.

I have always lived like I’m walking on eggshells around other people. Constantly afraid of causing offence, being hated or cast out. Perversely this led to me becoming very obnoxious in my late teens and twenties, especially when I was drunk. Attitude was, “as you’re going to find fault anyway, I might as well give you something to work with”.

The tip-toeing around and unshakeable fear that I was under constant scrutiny has been there for most of my 50+ years. I don’t know where it started but it’s been a constant passenger. I gave up drinking alcohol just over 3 years ago and while this nixed the enhancement of my paranoia, it did not solve the underlying issues. Being drunk had simply exacerbated an existing state or sometimes switched it to another, equally negative one.

Events that nearly broke me as I grew up, be it school bullying or the lonely, tragic death of my grandmother, have always held an unwanted resonance in my mind and stayed there like squatting lodgers.

I found out some years ago that I have a little thing known as Enhanced Emotional Memory. This is like photographic memory but it only activates in moments of extreme emotion. So…I can remember every good fuck I’ve ever had but, on the flip side, I can vividly recall losing my best friend at the age of 4 at playschool. EHM is not good. It is not accurate or impartial and the key word of “emotion” is the reason it is faulty. The memories become enhanced by the feelings you were experiencing both at the time and afterwards. They distort, and while the images and sound are usually faithful representations of what actually occurred, the anger, sadness, paranoia and anxiety surrounding what happened get magnified beyond control.

I had some news yesterday that really threw me and upset me a great deal. It was literally like getting punched in the face and I decided to take a day and simply think it over. A friend came over for dinner and I asked her what she thought of the situation. Her reply made a lot of sense.

“It wasn’t a big deal to them. And they don’t know why it is to you.”

The events in my life that have caused me the most grief and stress have invariably been that way due to my interpretation of them, not the events themselves.

Years ago, I did the Landmark Forum and one of the things the seminar leader mentioned was “there’s what happened and there’s what you made it mean”.

I’ve always felt lonely, isolated, judged and unwanted but, even when I think back to secondary school, I had good experiences or friends who helped me when I needed them to. I just focussed more on the bad shit, because I was pre-emptively preparing for disappointment and hurt further down the line. Like a self-destructive form of selective attention, I was in a room with blue and green wallpaper and only seeing the green.

I have always believed that I was being judged and that, even if people didn’t feel the same way I did or empathise with me, they knew how I felt. They didn't and they don’t.

The piss-poor, 1994 Street Fighter movie has one good line and it is:

“For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.”