BRAIN DAMAGE

Toni doesn’t believe me when I tell her how bad my memory is, how mortified I feel when I can’t remember what the movie I saw two nights ago was or what I learned about Lewis and Clark from a documentary last month. She insists I have extraordinary recall—of the important conversations and situations throughout my life. But that’s different, I tell her. I’ve had to remember those things to survive. My family distorted and denied everything to such an extent, I had to hold on to the facts of what was said and done—for dear life! They were as much of a life raft as I could pull together, my only hope of maintaining my sanity and not going under.

Most of what I learned in school, though, is gone. For years the only dates I could hold in my head were 1776 and 1066. When I get together with friends, they reminisce about outings I don’t have a single recollection of. For a long time I suspected that these memory problems had something to do with the level of anxiety I live with. I used to fantasize about having a brain operation, the surgeon stimulating various parts of my cerebral cortex with an electrode, so I could remember things long forgotten. The experts used to say that all your life’s memories were stored in there somewhere, however inaccessibly. But now they know that cortisol and other stress hormones damage neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain crucial to memory.

After reading an article on the subject in a Newsweek, in Toni’s waiting room, it struck me that emotional abuse damages the body as surely as physical abuse does—and sometimes even more irrevocably.