When Your Brain is Not Reliable

All through high school and college, I considered my memory to be impeccable. I trusted myself implicitly. I don't mean that I thought I knew everything. I didn't. But when I put information into my brain, it was reliable in offering that information back to me. I whizzed through college in part because I memorized things easily and wrote quickly and well when it came to essays. I tested out of a lot of subjects, as well.

When I went to graduate school and got married, I still relied on my own feelings and impressions. If I was worried about something, I figured that was because it mattered, and I should pay attention. I stayed up all night every once in a while because I was thinking about serious, important stuff. I could figure things out if I tried hard. My brain was dealing with subliminal clues and seeing ahead clearly. If I thought there was a problem, there must be a problem. If I only worked at it, I could figure out the answer.

And then I hit 35. I was deeply depressed for about 5 years, and my kids turned into teenagers. And my relationship with my brain changed completely. In addition to the very real problem of not being able to remember things easily anymore, I had several experiences in which I checked my memories of an event with historical, paper records, and discovered that I was wrong. Things like facts about my GPA and test scores in high school, which I was sure I would remember. But also other things like nuances about a remembered conversation or argument. And my kids were always helpfully reminding me that they remembered things differently than I did, as well.

After a long stretch of problems with insomnia mostly related to imaginary problems that I kept circling around and around trying to solve, I came to accept that my brain was, in fact, not reliable. I don't know if this is only a truth of being older and having a less effective brain or if, perhaps, it was never as reliable as I thought it was as a teenager and early 20 year-old. It seems to me that both are equally possible. But it doesn't really matter. Because I've reached the point where I don't believe that anything is actually “true” in the way that I once thought it was. I certainly don't think that I am ever “right” or that there is really any point in being “right” anyway.

Mostly, I don't try to find out what is right and wrong anymore. I try to understand other people and a little bit of the vastly different lives that other people live and I can only catch a glimpse of. And when my brain goes high wire into anxiety mode, I remind myself that it's likely wrong. I don't act on impulse because I don't trust myself to act on impulse. I always give it a few days, a few weeks, a few months to see how things settle out. Because how I feel is not the same as what is real. I suppose this might sound pathetic or like I am weak, indecisive, and afraid of my own opinions. It's really less that than it is the realization of the size of the world and the smallness of my perceptions.