It’s therapeutic, too. Because I forget so much, and sometimes feel guilty about it. Growing up going to school and studying for exams it was always so important that I remembered what I had learned. It was often the students that could remember the most that did the best on exams. I wanted to be a good student so I would take my study guides everywhere with me, reading them over and over, not paying attention at all to where I was or who I was with. It can become the same way with maintaining your identity. If you are constantly worried about who you are, and making it seem like you are this person, then all the new inputs from your present cannot get in and flow through and affect you.

Like Borges said, “One publishes a book to forget it.” I write my characters to forget them. I used to think so utilitarian about my experiences and worry about how they were adding to I-at-large, the holistic concept I had of myself. I worried when I got so deeply involved in something and “forgot who I was.” Like a Western-colonial-capitalist, I was trying to swell, get bigger, have more. I wanted each book, memory, skill, experience to be an addition to my sum. But my natural capacities for memory were slightly-above-average at best and worsening all the while due to my drug habits. So I was working so hard to add what I would shortly lose anyway as it would simply be forgotten or else displaced by whatever else I would add. The things I remember best are whatever I’m presently experiencing.

Writing my characters allowed me to deposit my memories somewhere outside of myself. I could forget them and not feel guilty about losing them forever. So now I am more comfortable as just a conduit of the present. I put it down on paper and send it wherever it needs to go, which is sometimes the waste basket, but even then I don’t have to carry it with me, weighing me down. I’m lighter and empty for new and full experiences.