You never forget where your keys are. Or where you parked. Or the name of that minor character in that one episode of The West Wing. Studying? A breeze. Exams? Light work. You don’t “cram,” because you don’t need to. You read it once—really read it—and it’s there. Forever. You can recite entire passages from books you haven’t touched in years, tell someone exactly what day Caitlyn Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, and what shirt you were wearing when you saw it.
It’s not just data—it’s placement. You remember quotes by where they fell on the page. You recall birthdays like a human calendar. You know which drawer the passport is in, even in a house that looks like a tornado tried minimalism and gave up halfway through. People call it a photographic memory, but that phrase undersells it. It’s not a photo—it’s a scene, in motion, with sound design and lighting direction. More like living in your own personal Criterion Collection of memory.
I remember dreams like films—high budget, full color, with scores that somehow only exist inside my own head. I keep a dream journal and it reads like a cross between David Lynch and Studio Ghibli. It’s a highlight reel I get to keep forever. There’s a luxury to that. An intimacy. A sense of presence that most people lose when the day ends or the night fades. I never lose it. Not really.
So yes, there’s power here. Precision. A kind of secret weapon for life.
And then there’s the rest of it.
Because the thing no one tells you about remembering everything is that you remember everything. Not just the cool stuff. Not just the good days and the jokes that landed and the songs that made the night feel endless. You remember what people said when they were trying to hurt you. You remember what your father’s face looked like exactly the moment the screaming started. You remember the sound of the door slamming, the pause in the argument before the real damage landed.
I was abused as a kid. And now I’m a father. And some days, some little thing—a toy left out, a certain kind of silence—can drop me straight into a moment I thought I’d left behind. Like temporal displacement. Not just a memory—an experience. Fully sensory. Fully alive.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s regression. It’s being pulled out of the present and slammed back into the past. You don’t get to choose when it happens. And you don’t get to explain it in real time.
It affects everything. I remember entire conversations—word for word. Arguments. Passive-aggressive asides. The way someone phrased a lie they later denied ever saying. And people? People hate that. People love to forget. They love wiggle room, the freedom to revise their own story. “That’s not how I remember it,” they say.
And I’m standing there thinking, But I do. And you’re wrong. And here’s the quote.
Relationships get harder. Work gets weirder. My wife hates it. Not in a cruel way—more in a tired, human way. Because I’m not just holding on to facts. I’m holding on to feelings. And when those feelings come back—good or bad—they come back like weather. And you can’t reason with a thunderstorm.
Sometimes I second-guess myself. Because even though the memory is sharp, the details can be wrong. I’ve missed exits on highways because I remembered the right image but paired it with the wrong exit sign. And when you’re used to being right, being wrong—especially in great detail—is mortifying.
There’s OCD involved too. Probably. I’ve read about how OCD sometimes links up with autobiographical memory. Maybe it’s the same neural highway—over-recording, under-forgetting. Either way, it makes my head a loud place to be when things get dark.
Emotionally? It’s a mixed bag. When I’m up, everything sparkles. When I’m down, it’s a hell-loop of greatest hits I didn’t ask to replay. I’ve had friends. Partners. Lovers. Some were gentle. Some weren’t. And the ones who tried to rewrite the past, or gaslight it into something that made them look better—it never worked on me. And that, I think, made them angrier than anything I actually said.
I don’t think I’m special. Just strange. And not in a “gifted child” sort of way. In a “life is long and sometimes you don’t get to forget the worst parts of it” sort of way. I’ve never used my memory to get rich. But I plan to use it to do some good. I want to be a public defender. If someone says “That never happened,” I want to be the one who knows when they’re lying.
So yeah. It’s cool to remember Goodnight Moon like I just read it this morning. And it’s cool to quote Dostoevsky at the drop of a hat. (“The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humored and capricious people could live under such a sky.”)
But also? Some days I’d give anything to forget.