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INTRODUCTION Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory.

If you still remember them its because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life. -William Zinsser ________________________________________________________________________________________________ It was so quiet I heard dust hit the cherry hardwood floors of my therapists office. I could see it in my peripheral vision as sunlight seeped through the blinds and illuminated the small dancing particles into blinding whiteness. My mind could not focus enough to recall what I had read in a single sentence, but this was something over which I could obsess for hours without distraction. I was absorbing everything in my immediate environment. I maintained eye contact with my therapist, but my brain was nowhere near our conversation. If one dove deep enough into my brain, meandered through the nooks and crannies known as neural pathways, around the much-explored regions of my forebrain, and into the hippocampus and amygdala, she would find the origin of all my problems. Far beyond the measuring capabilities of modern science rests a silver and copper machine of great potential and detail. I should know, my brain is its permanent home. It is this machine that allows me to absorb the most obscure and minute details of my physical environments at rapid speed, creating an archive of snapshot memories. These snapshots reach back to when I was just three years old and overlooking the white wood railing of my younger brothers crib as his green eyes smiled back at me with innocence. Tacos were cooking in the kitchen of our Katie, Texas home at the time. But this is just where these pictures start. Worksheets from elementary school come through in vivid detail, and I can close my eyes and read questions from a given activity. I used to be able to recite most American presidents and the years they served just by looking at the same classroom poster each day, though now I can only remember the exact years of some. I can see my childhood handwriting on offwhite practice paper with blue lines and dashes there to guide the learning student. I can mimic its form almost identically just by closing my eyes and referencing a particular still frame. I can see all of the images with my eyes opened or closed, in chronological order or not, at random without choice or with very focused intent. The machine decides which life moments get processed and archived. While my therapist asked me questions, presumably about my sleep patterns or past relationships or eating and exercise habits, I responded nonverbally, but still in strong ways. I had learned quite young that too much silence made people question my ability to focus, so I let her think I was still in the conversation by sighing, rolling my eyes, crossing my arms, or tapping the heel of my foot on the floor. All through childhood, I never lacked the ability to focus, despite what many therapists and teachers said. I just wasnt focusing on them and what they had to say. In this particular moment with my therapist, I was processing the deep browns found within the floor, the illuminated computer screen behind her, the 1

stark white of the sun resting on the bland windowsill, the deep green of the office plant resting dully on the bookshelves. The colors nearly blinded my eyes as they traveled through the deep red optic nerve, wiggled their way through the visual cortex and splattered messily against the walls of some pink neural pathway in my forebrain. By this point they have been converted and condensed into a single puddle of memories, like melted gold. The memories rolled down a slight decline and into a drain that allowed them to be transferred into the main copper pipe of the otherwise silver machine. The memories are further processed in ways I admittedly do not fully understand, and stored somewhere I have not yet seen. But they are archived rather efficiently, and seem to be packaged by the machine like clean gold ingots, perfectly rectangular and aesthetically pleasing. Focusing I was, and without issue. And while this moment in my life was not particularly interesting, the machine archived the information anyway, and so I will carry it with me forever. But thats the nature of these snapshots. Some are cherished, some are haunting, and some are simply inconsequential. They are also all I have. I do not possess a single memory that naturally plays out like a fluid movie. Instead, I see my past played out frame-by-frame, often with time lapses between them. I do not have one memory of my little brother taking his first steps, but have two. One snapshot is of him balancing himself against the kitchen island, and the other shows his left bare foot on the ground with his toothy grin beaming. Common sense allows me to fuse these separate images together, but I have long been aware that this ability to creatively complete memories also means I cannot remember them purely. Having your memory challenged can lead one down a path of danger and uncertainty, as you will soon read. This work is meant to share my experiences with memory perception, and how such tender circumstances can become paralyzed, discarded, repressed, denied and ignored when an individual endures chronic anxiety, and does so within a society that is unwilling or unable to grasp the condition in its entirety. This is an attempt to transfer the picture memories of my past into word. Medication and my own insecurities about being socially identified as a psychiatric patient have long played a role in the growing fuzziness of the memories themselves. While I still recall hundreds of images, I have noticed small changes in my ability to recall some of the incredibly specific details of some memories. And this frightens me. These details are understandably irrelevant for most (for example, whether I used to dot the lowercase letter i in my name on my homework assignments), but much of my life has been inundated with outsiders telling me my memories are wrong, inaccurate, and unreliable. When I was first taken to a psychiatrist as an eight year-old child, I tried explaining what I could of how I processed the world under such tense biological circumstances. What I explained was largely taken out of context and applied to what could be explained within the medical and scientific community. Those explanations worked for them, but they did not (and do not) work for me. 2

Crippling anxiety resulted in the dismissal of many happy memories, too, and my diagnosis created such debilitating self-doubt that I spent much of my adolescence believing my brain was defunct and useless. Walking through bookstore aisles as a teenager, I realized that the official understanding of psychiatric conditions, those written by doctors and researchers, were shelved in completely different areas than those written by patients and their families (and which typically transition to fiction the next aisle over). Of course, my bookstore theory only reinforced the feeling of social segregation I had housed for a long time. But this did not mean I accepted it readily, that I did not suggest to myself that this paranoia about something as silly as a bookstores layout was a bizarre manifestation of my stubborn brain, desperate to be right when doctors had proven it wrong. No, many internal battles were fought in my quest to rescue what was left of my life from the jaws of old science and preconceived notions on mental illness. So the details matter. As a child, my eyes stared into the ceiling of my bedroom each night as I prayed for someone or something to save me from where I had ended up. From the hospital, the doctor and nursing staff, and from my own behavior that had landed me there in the first place. Despite being discharged from the hospital and moving from the state of Iowa, the experience was so powerful and so demanding that part of me still walks the lonely halls waiting to be rescued, like a shadow that managed to get loose but is still looking for its original owner. You will read how staff members and even the hospital itself managed to become something outside of my diagnosis over the past 17 years, but part of me has not. You will first read my memories of how anxiety encroached upon and seized my childhood self without remorse or mercy, and the most genuine and unaltered memories that transpired as a result of such debilitating panic. It took 17 years to find the courage to investigate these events of my childhood, and I lived with the snapshot memories as the only type of data to explain these peculiar experiences. It is therefore important for me to ensure the reader also experiences my childhood in the way my mind processed the information as best as I can. The section that follows is what I consider a transition period. It is characterized by foggy memories of my teenage years that actually offered a recluse from the more severe manifestations of the anxiety. I managed to find comfort and stability during these years, though I was still far from peaceful. School was not as much of a challenge as it had been, and I attended regularly and finally had the chance to prove my intelligence with high grades. You will then be provided the medical notes from my time hospitalized to solidify the more uncertain details that lag behind in my archived set of memories. This will also allow you to peer into the minds of the doctor, nursing staff and hospital social worker in charge of characterizing my behaviors and expressions into clinical explanations. You will read briefly what it took to uncover these records, the emotionally charged journey required of a person who hopes to find evidence of her own past. The medical records are riddled with ambivalence; some entries are definitive in proving dates and locations, others are more ambiguous and tainted by patronizing undertones. 3

Photographs will be infused throughout the writing as well. These photographs were taken in late February 2012 when I returned to Sioux City to retrieve my medical records, and remain an important component to this piece. The best way I can describe the processing of my memories is by comparing them to snapshot photographs, but this still leaves a lot to be interpreted by the individual reader. The photographs have all been digitally manipulated to best represent the images stored in my brain. Colors are extremely contrasted and saturated, but it is exactly how things look when I call upon these memories today. Reading my history will certainly leave you with questions, and most are intentionally left unanswered until the medical records place them in some kind of context. They are the same questions I carried in my heart and mind for almost twenty years as I dwelled upon the few memories I have of my time hospitalized. It was not until two months before this project was completed that a benevolent and saintly worker from the medical records department of Mercy Hospital spent a week buried in archived files and found my dusty records. They were found despite the fact that this particular batch of records, those of anyone hospitalized for behavioral health issues, were scheduled for shredding in 2003. Its surprising, but Ive seen crazier things, the records worker told me. Me too.

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