I do not remember a time before remembering.
My earliest memory is not a moment or a place, but a page. I was five, sounding out the words in Goodnight Moon, and as soon as I reached the end, the pages were simply there. Not as images exactly, but as something I could turn over in my mind with the same clarity as turning the physical page. It did not feel special. It felt like the way reading was supposed to feel.
Adults didn’t know what to make of me. I didn’t know what to make of me. All I knew was that something was different, and that difference made school feel like a series of small, quiet misunderstandings. Teachers love a bright kid, but they hate a seven-year-old who corrects them, and I could always tell when something was off. If a teacher misquoted a line from a story, I felt it like a grain of sand in my eye. Eventually, I learned to stop. People don’t like the kid who’s always right.
By the time I was twelve, the ability had become double-edged. I had this mental library I could access instantly, but it didn’t know how to stay quiet. Someone would say a word—“night,” “river,” “black,” anything—and my mind would kick off into a chain reaction: a quote from Dostoevsky, then a line from Nietzsche, then a paragraph from the Bible, then a joke someone sent me last week. Sometimes the joke would be wildly inappropriate, and I’d blurt it out before I could stop myself. That got me more than a few lectures.
And there is also the cruelty of remembering things you wish you didn’t. There are jokes, comments, messages, moments that people forget five minutes after they say them. I don’t. My friends think it’s funny to send me awful memes because once I’ve seen it, it’s stuck in the same vault where Dostoevsky and Nabokov live. Forgetting isn’t an option; my recall doesn’t come with a delete key.
I’ve had to learn not to answer questions too precisely. In middle school, a teacher gave a test with a question pulled directly from the textbook. I wrote the answer exactly as it appeared, word for word. That earned me a trip to the principal’s office. After that, they gave me tests verbally until they understood I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t trying to show off—I was answering in the only way my brain knew how.
People think this ability must feel magical. It doesn’t. It feels mechanical, like a reflex I can’t turn off. I don’t concentrate to memorize. I don’t build memory palaces. Things just stick. I can read a sentence once and it settles into place, filed away without my permission.
But the strange part is that my understanding is completely ordinary. If I read a book about quantum mechanics, I remember every word but understand no more of it than another beginner would. I’m not a genius. I just have the entire textbook in my head whether I want it or not.
It affects my life in ways people don’t expect. When I write essays, I constantly second-guess myself: Is this my thought, or did I read it somewhere? I check myself for accidental plagiarism the way other people check their teeth for spinach. When I read different editions of the same book, the page breaks create separate memories that compete with one another. If I’m sad or anxious, my mind becomes a crowded, unpleasant place where every miserable thing I’ve read floats to the surface.
But sometimes it is incredible. I can pick up a law book I’ve never read, skim a page, and recite it minutes later. When someone misquotes a line, I know instantly. When someone tries to debate theology with me, I can recite the entire Bible back at them—an odd talent for an atheist.
The strangest moment happened in high school. A mock-trial coach wrote her name on the board, and before I could stop myself, I said, “Oh—are you the same person who was arrested for a DUI on Main Street at two in the morning?” It had been a small local news story. She looked like I’d slapped her. She never liked me after that.
People ask if I use it for money. I don’t. People ask if I use it to impress others. I try not to. People ask if I use it to cheat. I never have.
But if you ask me how it feels—really feels—to live with a mind that never stops recording, the closest comparison is a room whose lights you can’t turn off. Everything you’ve ever read is there, perfectly preserved, glowing slightly, waiting to be called on, whether you asked for it or not.
Some days it’s a gift. Some days it’s a burden. Most days, it’s both.
And I have no idea what it will feel like twenty years from now—whether it will fade or intensify or simply continue exactly as it always has.
All I know is that it’s mine. And I’m still learning how to live with it.