Trauma-induced amnesia was never something I realized was a studied phenomenon until I explained to my therapist the lack of memories I had until the age of eighteen. I had recently started to reconcile with the fact that I had few memories that were discernible or that didn’t feel similar to recalling dreams.
Some flashes were retained.
A meth pipe in a dark room, drawing spirals in the air as my toddler self stood on my tiptoes over a table to watch in amazement. Sleeping on the floor with my mom and sister, waking from a dream I had about my little sister that I was no longer able to see. A large bed by a window with a friend named Willow.
A bus in the woods we called home.
The hill next to our tent in the fairgrounds when we were unhoused youth. A term I still struggle with, since our situation was always referred to as homelessness until human rights advocates recognized the importance of seeing this population as actual people.
Some memories have taunted me in their vagueness. Blurry images that reveal only feelings rather than the physicality of actual events. The deepness of the dread in my chest, the dissociation that had been my longest friend. I feel they are on the cusp of realization of why they’ve become blanks, why my brain has stopped me from recognizing the facts of what I’ve been through.
A home with tall ceilings and wooden stairs, Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” filling in auditory blanks while leaving substance behind.
It wasn’t until I relayed to my husband that my childhood was a series of detached autobiographical scenes that I realized the severity of the amnesia. Even until the age of eighteen, certain memories relayed to me by my sisters are completely removed from me. My mom’s friend getting pulled over while my mom was in Costa Rica with her boss; my mom’s common position of being unconscious on the couch after a night of drinking, rarely seeing her home otherwise; events that seem neither mundane nor particularly traumatic. Why had I lived a life others remember me being part of while I can’t recollect when I had transitioned from our borrowed truck-camper home into our friends’ homes so we could have heat during the colder months? Why couldn’t I remember the fight that led me to the bathroom, where I had looked for a razor behind a locked door? The piecemeal puzzle pieces, without flat pieces to guide me, had left me vulnerable to distortions of truth I was unable to make meaning of.
Certain events had been revealed to me by my grandmother so casually that I had to ask for them to be repeated to understand if I was hearing correctly.
The early reveal that we had been unhoused often as children was easier to manage as a nonevent, since I was also told we were never left hungry.
As my mother confirmed in her own way what I had been told by unknowing witnesses to our youth, there had been additions and manipulations of the story that only left me with gratitude for my mother’s sacrifices. The McDonald’s meal she proudly relayed was split between me and my sister, but was also preceded by the knowledge that my mom herself could not eat. Our delays in our early education were blamed on medication that my mom needed to take to prevent the seizures that had constantly wrecked her body while she was pregnant with us. Our very birth, our presence in her body during gestation, was a sacrifice that was made selflessly. While direct gratitude wasn’t asked for, the unspoken rule was affirmation of her diligence as a young mother on her own. Homelessness was never by her own actions or inactions. Rather, our financial difficulties and lack of housing were the result of trusting the wrong person, another event that was not her responsibility but her victimhood. A drunken confession of an abortion during her disappearance when we were children was a bemoaned confession that it was an action only made to stop hurt upon me and my sister. Because our younger sister was taken from us, she could not put us through additional sibling loss.
Again, nods toward events I didn’t choose were a reminder of the sacrifices my mother had made for us that only pained her.
I had long ago settled with the fact that my memories were compartmentalized into parts of my brain that were inaccessible. This wasn’t allowed to hold space as a ramification of trauma, but as a typical part of myself—a quirk that perpetually made me ungrateful for the life I was given when compared to how it could have been. I never had to take a trash bag of belongings to foster care, was never offered drugs by my mother, and had never witnessed the image of my childhood dog being beaten to death against a wall.
The ongoing theme of my flair for dramatics was tethered to the fact that I’d never be able to recall aspects of adolescence that almost killed me and my sister.
I don’t recall what had made me realize I could request my CPS records from my youth. I don’t remember why I had been on this particular rabbit hole of records and truths that belonged in archives, untouched for decades.
I had remembered their presence once in the trailer that we had lived in with my mom, baby sister, twin, and my mom’s husband at the time. Again, feelings and emotions were the predecessor of the event, with only silhouettes of substance revealing themselves to me. The anger from my mom and her husband that CPS had been involved; the reminder that state removal meant a life in foster care, a presence in the home of strangers that would only offer cruelty.
I had wanted recollection of that event, wanted to know the events that had led to their presence in our home. What had happened after?
When I later was emailed that I would be given the files soon and there wasn’t a “ton of records,” I was preparing for a singular page, maybe two, on the events that would reveal at least the year it took place.
What came to be sent to me on the twenty-fourth of September was fifty pages of records in Washington State alone.
Being left alone in an overflowing tub with my sisters at three, with water seeping into the apartment below, led to the discovery of the three of us, presumably in cold water—an event that took twenty-four hours to investigate.
A sexual abuse investigation into my mother’s boyfriend when I was five.
The discovery of an apartment overrun by runaways and drug abuse; a sudden transition to my five-year-old self starting to wet my clothes and being left in said clothing; the description that we were always filthy; no bed existing for me and my sisters; a couch full of exposed nails; and a butcher knife occupying the space next to our room. There was also a note that we were not fed by our mother, but instead by neighbors who took enough pity on us to ensure our survival.
Reading that our food-security needs were fulfilled by neighbors put new meaning to events that were previously met with laughter. When my twin sister and I had moved in with my grandmother and great-grandmother, we had established which houses provided food and treats. An older gentleman specifically had a red truck that he parked to the right of his trailer, an indicator that he was home and available to ask for food. By the time these neighbors had opened their doors, they had their store-provided menu relayed to us. When our grandma and great-grandma had learned of this habit, there was frustration and begging for the habit to end, along with a reminder that our fridges had been stocked and it was unnecessary to ask neighbors for what was in their pantry.
When my grandma later relayed the story of first taking us in and making a dinner consisting of veggies, potatoes, and chicken, we had stared wide-eyed at what was provided, asking, “Is it Thanksgiving?” I felt sad.
There was context to stories that before had not been preceded by the information that my sister and I, from the age of three, had to find food for ourselves.
I had to Google words like “enuretic,” look at addresses that only guessed at locations between certain cross streets that contained no homes, and read reports that we were evading questions that would validate fears of more sexual abuse or grooming.
As the pages upon pages continued piling up, redactions omitted events and truths I was not able to access because of the rights of others who had not given permission; only explicit events regarding myself were allowed.
There has been an odd sense of disconnection from the files that revealed my life had been glaringly different from what I was told. The situations that were never hinted toward or attempted to be altered had exposed memories that were probably nonexistent to my mother herself.
When relaying the bullet points to my therapist, and when I was asked about the feelings I had while retelling them, I felt like I was telling the story of a stranger off a PowerPoint presentation. The emotional connection of a child merely trying to navigate a world of neglect through self-induced lessons of survival had not hit a chord of sadness in me, but rather affirmed my ability to move forward without looking back. While I remained the person who had guttural sobs while reading about NICU babies in Palestinian hospitals abandoned by the world, my own abandonment was met only with frank pragmatism. I had been raised on the idea that my situation was an honorable gift, while the plight of others was an ideological sin to ignore. Centering my pain and trauma meant foregoing the sacrifices of others, with ingratitude being against familiar core values. Any questioning or remark that pondered our situation as abnormal or unfair was met with intense anger and pointed acknowledgment of what we had that others did not, notably those within our family.
Allowing myself to look at my life as a minor through the lens of any pity or sadness feels foreign and wrong, like pouring water down a sink because of the presence of a gnat.
When my therapist had implored me to imagine the situation happening to a child who was not me—a four-year-old ending up on the steps of a stranger’s home to be fed—I felt my heart attempt to find empathy. Any other child in my consciousness was allowed to be a child. I was only ever allowed to be a survivor.
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