It’s some sort of a disassociative childhood trauma that we put up inside ourselves to either forget something horrible, traumatic or just generally depressive.

I grew up poor in my Indigenous family and everywhere I turned from the moment I was born, there was near constant tragedy and trauma. And if it wasn’t happening around me, people were also remarking, remembering or recalling even more horrible things from the past. On top of that, I basically attended one or more funerals for friends, family or close relatives every single year of my life until I was 20 and left home. I saw funerals for old people, middle aged people, adults, teenagers, children and babies. Add to that the reality of knowing that as a kid, everything was kind of OK but I knew that as an adult I would be completely on my own and would have to do something while living in a world that probably didn’t want me because I was just another ‘Indian’.

By the time I was about 12 - 13 a switch went off in my head that basically said … ‘OK let’s turn everything off and just run on auto pilot for a while’ … it’s a coping mechanism to just forget and disassociate from everything and everyone and just go on living without really thinking about anything. I have entire years of my teenage life that are just black empty periods with no memory. I still have family and friends who come up to me to say ‘hey, remember that time you did that amazing thing?’, ‘you jumped from a high dive at the lake’, ‘you did an amazing jump with a dirt bike and crashed and flipped a million times’, ‘you played hockey with so and so and you guys won a tournament’ … entire periods of my life that are just blank, empty and lost. Sometimes I think really hard and look back and its like trying to recall a TV show or movie I saw 30 years ago and just remember an image or two but nothing about what the movie was about.

I’ve never been diagnosed with anything or ever seen a doctor or psychiatrist about any of this … never had the time or the money or the access to see one. By the time I could afford it all, I had pretty much dealt with my inner (and outer) demons in my life to be able to live with it all. Alcoholism was another problem I had to deal with and AA, NA, Al-Anon and years of being part of support groups really helped a lot. And I’ve seen the same thing with so many people like me that I grew up with and so many other young Native people I see today.

Memory is a liar. It feels when you’re accessing it like it is reliable. It is not. Eyewitness testimony frequently has people who adamantly remember stuff that didn’t happen. They tried it with those famous events where people always remember where they were when so-and-so happened. They got a population of people, found out where they were when the shocking world event had happened, and then they asked them a long time later and a lot of people’s vivid memories of where they were, were just bullshit their brain made up for them.

You can actually create false memories in people that will feel completely real, if you know how to do it, and they’ll remember both the process of you implanting the false memory, and then this fake memory that they 100% remember as if it had happened.

The brain just stores hints and mostly-important stuff, and for the rest it just makes shit up as it goes along so you can get on with your day and won’t become upset because you don’t remember. But it’s like an LLM. It just makes up nonsense if it doesn’t know the answer, and to you it feels 100% real.