on forgetting

my students call me a brainy goldfish. they mean it kindly. it's become a running joke — i'll be in the middle of teaching a problem, forget the standard derivation, pause, and then build a different derivation in front of them. they wait. they're used to it. someone makes the goldfish joke. we move on.

i don't remember a lot of things people expect me to remember. names of people i've met. dates from my own life. formulas i've used for years. plots of books i've finished. the goldfish nickname is accurate. i've stopped fighting it.

what i want to say in this essay is the part the joke leaves out.

most people treat forgetting as deficit. something to fight with flashcards, spaced repetition, mnemonics. the whole genre of memory improvement assumes the goal is more — more retention, more recall, more of the past kept available.

i think this is partly wrong. forgetting isn't only a loss. it's also a mechanism. it's what the mind does to keep itself usable.

the most obvious case is grief. nobody who's lived through real grief wants to remember it at the original intensity forever. time alone doesn't heal much. what changes people is usually some mixture of forgetting, reinterpretation, and distance. the memory stays. the feeling that came with it gets quietly unbundled. eventually you can describe the event without the event being present. sometimes that's damage. sometimes it's adaptation. often it's hard to tell the difference from inside.

the same is true for anger. for embarrassment. for the version of you who was wronged or wrong, ten years ago. you didn't earn peace with these by remembering them more clearly. you earned peace by slowly forgetting how they felt.

i forget more than most people. this is something i used to feel bad about. now i think it's part of why i'm okay.

people close to me know i can't recall difficult events from my own life with the heat they originally had. i remember that they happened. i can't reach the emotion anymore. for me, this is mercy. for some people who've been through what i've been through, the inability to forget is the hardest part — the past stays vivid and keeps costing them. mine doesn't. that's not a virtue i developed. it's just how my mind happens to work. but it's also why i can talk about hard things without flinching, why i don't carry resentments well, why old fights with old friends mostly slip into a category somewhere between facts and rumors.

i remember the structures. i forget the surfaces. what stays is what something taught me. what fades is what something felt like. usually the wound fades before the lesson does. i've come to be grateful for that.

the cost is real and i won't pretend otherwise. i forget names of people who've been kind to me. i lose entire books i've finished. i can't always recall what i said in a conversation last week. these aren't small things — they affect how people experience me, and sometimes they hurt people who deserved to be remembered better than i remembered them.

memory is part of how people feel held onto, and forgetting too much can make a person seem lighter in ways that aren't always kind.

but i can re-read a book and meet it freshly. i can teach a topic i've taught a hundred times and find a new way into it. and the heavier things, the ones it would not have helped me to keep — those i've been quietly free of, on a timeline i didn't have to negotiate.

if you're someone who forgets — names, events, the texture of your own past — i'm not going to tell you it's an advantage. it isn't, straightforwardly. but it isn't only a deficit either.

the culture around memory is one-sided. we celebrate people who remember everything. we worry about people who don't. we build whole industries around extending recall. almost nobody talks about what forgetting is good for. and forgetting is good for some things that matter more than what we usually use memory for.

if you're trying to fix this in yourself, ask first what you're trying to fix. if you're trying to retain a fact for a job, that's one kind of problem and there are tools for it. if you're trying to hold onto a feeling because you think holding onto it makes you loyal to a person or a moment — i'd ask whether the feeling has done its work yet. some feelings are meant to be temporary. when you stop forcing them to stay, they leave on time, and what's left is what they taught you. which was always the point.

there are kinds of forgetting that aren't mercy. some people lose parts of themselves they wanted to keep. some memories need to stay sharp because they're tied to love, responsibility, or promises made to other people. forgetting is not automatically wisdom. sometimes it's avoidance. sometimes it's injury. sometimes it's simply loss.