Self: Katy Schneider - My Spotless Mind

The existential divide between Rememberers and Forgetters.

- Katy Schneider

I CALL MY SISTER all the time to ask her about myself. Like, “Lily, do you remember if and when I completed my HPV vaccination series?” “Yes, in ninth grade. You complained that your arm was sore afterward.” She describes my past with an unnerving ease.

I am 32, I am neurologically healthy, and I have a terrible memory. Not in the sense that I constantly lose my keys or forget the names of colleagues. More in the sense that after I experience something, it doesn’t tend to stick for very long. I believe I have 50 recollections in total, all high-drama events that I’ve repeated to myself so often they’ve become canon. My sister describes her memory as something I more closely associate with the word memory: an accessible inventory of her past, filled with both mundane and emotional files, colored with rich detail. In conversation, she casually brings up childhood playdates, Monday-night dinners from a decade ago. I, meanwhile, have begun to feel my college years slipping.

To my mind, the world is split into people like my sister and people like me: Rememberers and Forgetters. My friend Sarah is a Forgetter. “A few years after a period ends, it disappears,” she says. “Save for a few especially emotional moments, there are entire swaths of my life that are blank.” My friend Henry is a Forgetter too. (Henry and Sarah are both pseudonyms.) “Whenever I’m reading an interview where someone is talking about how they got to where they are, they’ll drop these anecdotes, and I’m like, What? I don’t have anecdotes like that,” he says. When I asked a friend at work about her memory, she said, “I guess if I picked, say, the summer after sixth grade, I could remember what books I was reading, which friend I was hanging out with most, the time she cut my hair, what math exercises I did, and what I was doing on the computer. You can’t?” Rememberer.