Ava or Rebecca? Or...schizo?

What if you actually GOT amnesia? I know that amnesia doesn’t exactly work the way it seems to on House but wouldn’t it be kind cool if it did? If you didn’t know who or what you were, where would you start?

I’m going to go ahead and skip straight over the whole the essential elimination of all good relationships and happy memories, the emotional trauma and potentially stunting aspect of it because…well, that’s just not fun to think or write about. And really, if I could or wanted to accurately imagine and record that, I’d be writing a novel. No novel. Blog.

Skipping over all that then we get to the fun part: the do-over. If you don’t remember anything then you are in fact, as an adult, not the sum of your experiences because you effectively don’t have any. Does that mean that you get to choose yourself? I suppose this could boil down to a nature vs. nurture debate. For example: my vehement dislike of horror movies, nature or nurture? Would Slate-Wiped-Clean Anna like horror movies? Or would she simply suffer though I Am Legend because she doesn’t know that perseverance and ‘happy’ endings won’t make her feel better? And the debate rages on…. So not only would you get to rediscover sushi, trampolines, the ocean and vanilla lattes, but you also find yourself free from assumptions about yourself that formed way too early to have a basis in truth. Assumptions like, “I’m not athletic.” Or “I’m the smart one.” Or “I’m the quiet one.” Assumptions that really only hold us back, because nobody is the athletic one, or the smart one or the quiet one all the time. So, if I didn’t know that I’m uncoordinated or un-athletic, maybe I’d not only be brave enough to try but also confident enough to succeed. If I didn’t know that some people just don’t listen to me when I speak, maybe I would speak in a way that would make them want to listen. But if everyone around me still knew these things about me, would that alone have the power to shape me back into the same person?

The ultimate solution to all these maybes though is to discard what we know about ourselves without risking traumatic brain injury. It is so tempting to define ourselves with what we have been and what we have done. Maybe we just need to remember that we don’t really know much about ourselves because there’s so much that we haven’t done yet.

Homework: define yourself by the things that you will do rather than the things that you have done.