speak up, memory
more of a "life update"
My memory got worse after I got sick, but it was at its very worst in the period between my big crisis (which was, if you’re new here, necrotizing pancreatitis)1 and the point at which I was diagnosed with exocrine pancreatic insufficiency and started taking enzymes so I could get nutrients out of my food. After this, my memory was worse than it had been before I was sick, but better than it was.
This year, however, things started to get bad again, to the point where I would finish books and find myself totally unable to recall them in enough detail to say, write a capsule review on here. I would think, hm, I need to read this again, but since I can’t read everything twice, I just moved on. I was troubled by this turn of events and assumed the problem was psychological. Maybe I was starting to put too much pressure on the newsletter—I remembered things fine, but since I usually read books twice for professional reviews, I was beginning to apply those standards here where they didn’t belong. It felt plausible, but I didn’t know what to do about that.
Things came to a head recently, though, when I was reading Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. People often discuss this series as “tricky,” and so when I finished the first book and started the second, it didn’t really bother me too much that there was a new character I could not recognize or that there seemed to have been a jump forward in time from the last book. I figured it would all be explained. I mean, it did “bother” me, but I assumed it was bothering me the way it was supposed to. Still, it kept not being explained and instead treated as something I was supposed to know already, and eventually—just in case—I went back to the first book. There I discovered that though I had definitely read the last chapter, I had almost no memory of it. (I remembered one line.) The inexplicable new character had been introduced there. The “jump in time” I experienced was much less severe. It was all in there, in a chapter I had read the day before.
And while it was nice, in a way, to know without any doubt that I was right and that there was something really wrong with my memory that was not just normal memory stuff, that it wasn’t some case of misplaced priorities or blowing things out proportion, it was also terrifying.
The culprit is probably the drug I’ve been taking to fall asleep, and since I read before going to sleep, especially if I’m trying not to look at my phone at all, that’s probably why its effect on my ability to remember what I’m reading has been so strong. I took one drug for a while, switched to another and quickly built up a tolerance, and switched back to the original one where I once again built up a tolerance. Both of these drugs are what’s called “z-drugs” and it does seem like there’s research that indicates z-drugs affect memory because you don’t sleep as deeply. The difference between “don’t sleep as well” and “don’t sleep at all” felt like a pretty easy call when I started taking these.2 I stopped taking it for a couple days, which helped, but then I started taking it again because I couldn’t sleep and was on a deadline.
Nothing really makes me feel like a failed animal the way “not sleeping” does. Being able to sleep feels like one of those things I should just be able to do. And then if I can’t fall asleep I should be some kind of freak of nature that doesn’t need to sleep. Instead I need to sleep all the time but don’t. I would die on the steppes from insomnia before I got around to dying for other reasons.
Anyway if I owe you an email I’m sorry I almost definitely literally do not remember. I will find it. If you are in line stay in line and so on.
Am I going to be putting this aside in when I’m fifty, I wonder, or will I have a new one by then.
Do not recommend sleep things to me—if they are things you can try without involving a doctor, I have tried them. I can promise you. They have been tried.
just here to express sympathy and solidarity with sleep problems. mine were worsened by a physical injury and weakness that made it painful to roll over, so I'd wake myself up every time I wanted to move in my sleep and an old dog who also had unexplained sleeping problems, but these were all on top of an underlying "sleep obstinance," where basically evening of my entire life, I think "maybe this is the day I've figured out how to never sleep again." no sleep hygiene, meditation, or even medicine, can triumph over mild delirium (exacerbated by not sleeping) that I've finally achieved a super power.
Memory things scare me. I was drugged once, robbed, and woke up two days later on my back floating in my dinghy in the middle of Zihuatanejo bay with the Mexican sun beating down on me except the part blocked by the Mexican fisherman standing, looking down at me from his panga asking necessitas ayuda? And people i tell that story to find it very disturbing but what i find disturbing is the knowledge that i was surely awake and conscious when i rowed out into the middle of the bay -- the folks who drugged me had no idea where my dinghy was and couldn't have lot me there -- but i have no memory whatsoever of doing it and that's what bothers me about it all. The knowledge that i was there for something i wasn't there for. Different situation really because mine is in the perfect past tense and yours sounds like imperfect. But it's meant to be an entertaining way of saying i feel scared with you and hope yours moves into the perfect past in a satisfactory way. And if it's not entertaining enough I'll tell you my Matisyahu story, which is also about memory and not really that funny but also inevitably kind of funny because it involves Matisyahu. Best...