Quite a while ago I wrote a post about one of my favorite concepts that, “We are all mosaics of the people we meet.” We bring with us the good and bad of the people we meet throughout our lives. As the saying by Eleanor Roosevelt goes, “Many people will walk in and out of your life but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.” However, interestingly, as we think about our memory storage process and inevitable conscious or subconscious retrieval of these experiences that grace us throughout life, it is also the total opposite that tends to stick with us. It is so hard to remember some things that I wish I could remember, but so unfortunately difficult to forget some other things I wish I would never remember.

Memory is fascinating, and as an undergraduate student I remember taking a higher-order neurologic class on the concept of Memory. While, i won’t go too much into the technical aspects, the storage of memory from the exterior to the internal parts of the brain and then the redistribution to a longer term web of connections is fairly complicated. The more senses and the more connections that go into a memory, the stronger it is and the easier or the more developed the retrieval might be. On top of this, for some reason, the bad will often imprint more than the good, likely due to the magnitude of the emotions we feel. Bliss and ecstasy might not outweigh pain, suffering, denial and anger.

I will never forget the one night that I signed out to a much more experienced provider at a job in Boston. I respected her so much and her training was spectacular. I vented, possibly not the most professionally at the time, about how I had come across an interviewer that left a bad taste in my mouth. During a virtual interview he made a big deal about my attire, even though it was certainly business casual… But, just because i had no tie on, he didn’t like me, it was very uncomfortable. She went on to tell me about a time when she was earlier in her medical training and an attending had been so mean to her during the routine clinical rounds that she had to go into a room to cry. However, for him, he acted this harshly and intensely towards almost every learner – we frown upon these things these days, but then was a different time. She went on obviously to do fantastic things and he likely forgot he ever made her cry among the plethora of others that shared the same fate. Still, as I will never forget she told me in the mutual vent session, “It is always interesting what sticks with you.“

I have tried for years to understand the best ways to trigger memory when i’d like it to function, and also schedule a memory clean when all i want is to erase the other thoughts that pervade every moment of tossing and turning when I’d like to sleep. We all do it, we all have thoughts that creep in when we finally settle down from the acute fixations of the day and take over all of who we are and bother us when we least want it. Unfortunately, however, what tends to stick with us is significant emotion and bad over good, time and time again.

Still, I anticipate and direct attention and intentionally focus on every single day and every interaction as one that might, for someone else, be a significant emotional highlight or disaster – you never know what is going on for another human. I try very hard as a medical learner and a medical teacher to focus on these things with my interactions with patients, coworkers and students. It has humbled me to have nursing students come back months down the line and remember me as the one doctor that took the time to teach them or pull them aside. It has opened my eyes to have a patient say I was one of their good memories. And it has humanized me to constantly be reminded of the fact that i am NOT always the best memory someone has and that sometimes I have become the crucifix that floats into their eyelids as they attempt to sleep at night.

When we look at our lives and everything that has passed, there are those things we remember because of intentional rhetoric and repetition; and, there are those times when our existence is embodied by the fate of ghosts we wish we could forget. But what sticks with us is often what we need, whether we like it or not.

Image Credit: https://healthmatters.nyp.org/what-is-causing-covid-brain-fog/