I Remember Everything (What I hate most).

I don’t have the luxury of forgetting details about anything I care about. Between having a photographic memory (to a point), skin memory, and very strong emotional connections with memories, there is rarely any escape.

I think this is why I’m so incredibly picky about the people I let close to me. I don’t have the ability to forget what we say to each other, touches, feelings, smells, sounds, tastes..etc..associated with those people. It’s what makes me great at analyzing human behavior. I keep notes (though I often don’t know it until my brain puts 2 and 2 together later on down the road) of people’s actions and how they change over time. It’s my curse. Couple this with severe trauma and it can get very, very hard to work with. It’s how I remember that hunger pains go away after 15 minutes and enough swallowing, or that labor feels like your eyes are being pulled through your fingertips while someone stabs you with butcher knives all over your body. I can feel it like it happened yesterday.

I can and do detect emotional changes in others with a drop of a hat because I can and do compare and contrast it in my head. I remember things that are said to me either in text or speaking with ease, even down to their tone of voice doing it. I am sensitive to the cadence and timber of voices. I’m extremely sensitive to touch and crave it as well as being terrified of it.

It’s why I try hard not to care about things. It’s why I distance myself even when I don’t want to. It’s why I’m weird and difficult. It’s what I hate most about myself.

I have wished most of my life that I couldn’t feel things as much as I do or see as much as I do. I wish I could be like normal people. But..instead…not only do I vividly see EVERYTHING when I think about it, I feel it with everything too. I learned to get around this a little bit by fact checking my feelings/other people’s feelings with people I care about. The problem is that I often know the answer before I ask it..and the other problem is that I often don’t want to know if I’m right or not. I know when people are lying to me or are trying to lie to me, I know when something is off. I’ll rarely say anything about it, though, because then I’ll have to remember every inch of that person walking away from me.

I get left behind a lot. Not because of anything I do, I don’t think, but rather that I tend to try to lift people up and then they just..move on to whatever is next. And it hurts. And I can’t forget anything about how much it hurts. And the worst part is that I can see and feel it coming from a mile away. So I put up walls around myself so it doesn’t hurt when it hits, and then try extremely hard to not be important to other people, either. Or at least I try to make it clear that being important isn’t an expectation. It doesn’t hurt as much when someone pulls away from you if you can tell yourself that you never meant much in the first place. The walls kill me, though. I hate putting up blocks with the people I love and care about more than I hate my memories. I hate feeling like I am too much. I wish I could see my light more and stop blaming myself for things that are out of my control. I wish I was less angry with myself for just…existing sometimes.

Maybe the first step is this, though, too. Another brick in the wall of why I’m me and accepting me for what I am. I hope so. It’s what I want to aspire to most…to be a person I can finally be proud of.