Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

by Sarah Polley

The past and present, I have come to realize, are in constant dialogue, acting upon one another in a kind of reciprocal pressure dance.

What follows are some of the most dangerous stories of my life: the ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. These are stories that have haunted and directed me, unwittingly, down circuitous paths. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry. These stories don’t add up to a portrait of a life, or even a snapshot of one. They are about the transformative power of an ever-evolving relationship to memory. Telling them is a form of running towards the danger.

I have been “considering” this story (as opposed to crying about it), and writing this essay, for twenty-one years. The one (the considering) does indeed keep me from the other (the crying).

And I don’t believe lying is the right word for the kind of inconsistencies that are common when someone tries to remember and relate the experience of being traumatized.

And what if much of what we are interpreting as lying is actually the blocking out of traumatic memory?

(I seem to have to learn, over and over again, that whatever problems I prepare my children for will always be a little to the left or right of where the problem actually lies. And the problems I am anxious about will generally turn out to be fine. The real problems are almost always surprises that can’t be prepared for.)

I wonder, now, if I escaped my childhood to arrive in this beautiful life, as I used to believe, or if I should be grateful to that childhood for leading me, so precisely, here.