Had a very weird experience a few days ago. I was at a store, minding my own business, when a woman plants herself in front of me, utters my name and stares at me expectantly. Not being a peopley person, I was already looking for the nearest exit, but the woman, sensing my confusion, tells me her own name, fully believing this would jolt my memory. Cold sweat started running down my spine.‘OK, I’m an idiot’. At long last, she says we were in middle-school together, smiling broadly, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to walk up to somebody you last saw over 30 years ago and expect to resume the conversation you were having when the bell rang and the math teacher walked in.
I was running out of options so I decided to go with it and pretend I remember her. 'Sure, how nice to see you, whoever you say you are.
I know I have a bad memory, but I’m not alone in not recognizing faces over a long period of time. It’s pretty normal, actually. The question is how do such people manage to recognize someone they knew in their childhood? We were barely teenagers when we last saw each other! I wish I could believe I have retained much of my youthful self, but this is not the case. Nor do I have any particular signs or that sort of striking beauty to make me easily recognizable. How the hell did she do that when I wouldn’t remember my own 7th grade face weren’t it for a couple of black-and-white pictures of that time. Actually, I do have on my computer one such picture, which I used in a post about childhood - I can hardly believe that’s me in the picture. As for the woman at the store, I’m still torn over which one of the girls was she exactly. I wouldn’t have recognized her after all these years even under torture. I would have died a miserable death protesting my innocence - ‘I don’t know who she is, I swear!’
(My daughter seemed to recognize me from the picture, but my boy, not a chance…)
I'm the one third from left, if you must know!
The problem goes beyond faces and physical resemblance, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t feel like I have anything in common with the child I was. So many things have happened, so much life in between. I’ve changed, I’m someone completely different. The awkward girl in the picture has nothing to do with my present self. Or at least that’s what I think.
After seriously wracking my brain, I admit that we probably were friends, we spent our breaks together, we had fun, I imagine, but there’s no real memory of those times. (That says a lot about school friendships and the socializing myth!)
Truth is those memories have been discarded as unimportant, just people I had to spend time with at a certain point in my life. I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels like my storage capacity is limited, so all the unimportant files have been deleted. Sorry, nice girl from the 7th grade, you belong in my forgotten past and, by the way, you had no business growing old, you should have stayed as you were back then if you wanted to have a shot at being recognized.
On the other hand, I think hope I could easily recognize the face of the cute teacher I had a crush on during the same period. A very childish thing, but very important for my emotional development. That is a memory my brain deems worthy of being preserved, the many hours spent playing in the schoolyard, not so much.
