I have a memory palace. They are rather common actually. Children are very good at them, they build them naturally, but they tend to have them drilled out in the class room. Mine stuck and so when needing to remembering things I walk through my palace and pick up the memory that I left in a particular spot. It’s similar to when people tell you they are looking through the filing cabinet of their mind to find the answer, only mine is spread out in an imaginary place, with never-ending rooms for new things. This worked very well when doing medicine.
It wasn’t so good in school. I was teased for my memory. When asked for a fact my eyes would close, my mind would roam. I would fetch it and bring it back and this could take a few seconds, depending on how old the memory was. A particular date in history for instance that I had learned months earlier might take 2 seconds but a poem recited ten years early might take seven. Being teased is rough. The girls would make a face – I assume it mimicked the face I made when roaming – and giggle. The shy ones, wanting desperately to fit in with the popular girls, would giggle too. Even the freckled red-head would have her non stop teasing suspended while the teasing train came my way and she was so glad of it. Girls can be cruel. We didn’t call it bullying back them. I was younger, defenseless. I was also motherless. That too was a reason to bully.
I dreaded being asked something in class. The murmurs would flow through out the room. The laughing was inevitable. Surely these teachers know they are causing me more problems. Sometimes a teacher will ask the student who knows, just to avoid the blank looks and cone of silence that has befallen each desk. Blast them for that. Pisses me off to this day. Put your self-interest in front of a childs you miserable adult.
Unfortunately, because of my memory, I can remember every instance. Every word. Every look. Every laugh. Every mimic in complete detail. I would block off that hall way if I could but it’s on the way to other things and once the memory is set, it’s there. That’s how my palace works. Passwords from fifteen years ago. The colour of a book jacket I read in year 3 – Ice Castles, blue banner up the top with white writing; Storm boy, cream with brown writing. The sticker on a neighbours letter box from thirty years ago, “we have our own religion, we don’t need yours.” It’s endless. It’s bothersome. I would like to forget a few things but forgetting means letting go of everything around it. It’s complicated.
Memory training has become popular of late. They even have competitions – Sexy Bald Man sent me a book about them. There are books and sites aplenty ,but there is a down side to the memory palace. In those rooms, with that shopping list I made five years ago, and every shopping list since, lies things best left dusty.
Of course some people rewrite the rooms. I can’t seem to. Mine doesn’t work that way. We have what we have and we work within it. I think that works with all of our elements, not just our memories. We have what we have and we work with it
My son, last year, suffered the inevitable bullying. Is there a child that hasn’t experienced this? He was teased because he has no father ( of course he has one, but not a live breathing one.) Ironic yes? I wouldn’t have thought all these years later this would still be an anomaly but apparently it is. Of all things in this day and age, to be bullied for being the child of a single mother, but there you have it, kids will pick on anything if they have a victim. He too was younger than his classmates, sensitive, kind ( not sure I was kind, though I was a bit strange.) I emphasised with him, telling him I too was teased as a kid.
“Really mum, but you’re cool.”
“Am I? How fantastic.”
We moved schools after he was pushed down some stairs and broke his arm.
He went to off to camp this morning. Happy, smiling, waving. He talked with friends and he went off joyfully. His friends – a mix of two parent and one parent families. He’s found his niche but the bullies are still out there, bringing little children down.
I was wondering where the parents of the bullies come into it all but I think for the most part they are oblivious; thankful their own kids are not being bullied. But maybe in their own way, they are.
Let’s hope number one son’s memory palace is the rewrittable kind. The 2.0 version.
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