Memory Box

In these recent posts I’ve been talking a lot about my childhood. It is as though I have taken the shoe box from beneath my bed and emptied the contents onto the floor, picking through it and revisiting the stories it holds. To keep picking through everything would be unhealthy. We all have shoeboxes under the bed. There was after all a reason for keeping memories in a shoe box in the first place. But maybe it is better that they are in the box because we put them there… rather than being there by default. Maybe it is better to put things back in the box when we are ready.

I am, slowly, putting my memory box away again. Whether I took it out in the first place, or whether it accidentally just got kicked open is debatable. I think that other people will always rather that the box was firmly closed and stowed away. Like I say, we all have a box like this. There’s nothing wrong in that and if you do ever root through yours - don’t worry that others might hurry you.

Yesterday I told my dad about this blog. And today I met with him to talk a little while. My dad is a good man. He came to this country with nothing and carved out a life for him and his little family. It was hard work and the world was a different place then. I’ve always wanted to be closer to him but never quite knew how to bring that about. It was good to sit in his garden and talk.

I remember years ago, when depression emerged and people named it, they would ask… ‘and do you know where it came from?’ And at first I would say ‘no’, ‘it came from nowhere’.  Then I would come to learn that it always seems to come from somewhere and now I know that in all likelihood it came from my early childhood. When I was a teenage I remember tearing a page out of a magazine. It was a woman’s face, photographed in black and white and so close that really the picture captured little more than her eyes. There was a quote from her on the page… in tiny white letters… which read ‘there is a deep sadness in me… I don’t know where it comes from’. I had that picture pinned to the wall behind my door for years. I was really attached to that picture and it meant something to me… but I also always felt there was a reason for pinning it up behind my door… where people were unlikely to know it was ever there. It’s funny to join up the dots so many years later.

Now with my attention on putting things away, I need to remind myself of the strategies I learnt in therapy that helped me change my life and liberate me from my own, inherent, faulty wiring.