Living with Memories of Suffering

Accepting, Mourning, and maybe even being grateful

Photo by Ashe Walker on Unsplash

This evening while doing the dishes I was listening to a old Arcade Fire song. There was a period of my life 16 years ago when I listened to Arcade Fire religiously. Non-stop. Every album, single, EP, B-side—everything. And it was also a period of (mostly) untreated OCD (on average, it takes 10 years from onset of OCD to get proper help). Anyway. So I’m doing the dishes, minding my own business and all of a sudden I’m transported back 16 years ago to this memory of me driving around Waco, TX in my car with my kids, ruminating desperately about some imagined harm I’d committed and in the background Arcade Fire was playing. And it just made me sad. Because I caught a glimpse of how terribly bad I felt in that moment, how alone, how desperate, how hopeless, how responsible for my children and yet irresponsible because of the OCD.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the character Sethe has this concept of “rememory.” A rememory is a living thing out there in the world where something (usually traumatic) has taken place. A kind of spiritual or supernatural memory. And even if it didn’t happen to you, if you walk into that space, that house, that plantation where the action took place, you can re-experience it all over again. Now, to be clear, I’m not at all comparing my suffering to the sufferings of Black American slaves. But I think Morrison was saying something larger about the way our memories of trauma and maybe just suffering in general work. We bump into them and relive them against our will sometimes.

That’s certainly been something like my experience. I can be going along fine and then someone reminds me of my old apartment, and I remember the places I used to ruminate or the ways I failed to be present with my family because of my OCD, and all of a sudden, it’s present with me, alive again. Not alive in full. As I argue in On Getting Out of Bed, you can never really imagine yourself back to your original state of suffering. You can only fully return if you fall back into the hole again. But there are glimpses you get, rememories, maybe.

You never know when you’re going to walk into a reminder of how bad you’ve felt in life. And many of us have felt so desperately bad at times. Places, people, experiences, books, songs, movies, that call to mind these memories are markers of misery or suffering. Times which should be markers of celebration, like holidays, become memories of struggles, where you momentarily relive the anxiety or depression all over again.

As you move toward recovery, this is one of the burdens you carry. You still have all these people, places, times, and things that not only remind you of where you have been, but evoke these emotions all over again. I can think of certain stretches of sidewalk in different cities that have powerful emotions tied to them for me. That’s weird when you think about it. I try not to.

So how do we live with memories of suffering? I’m not talking here about how we deal with Trauma. That’s an issue that you should seek the professional help of a therapist for. But instead I have in mind all those moments of suffering, of depression, of anxiety, of dread, of guilt, of despair from mental or life challenges in the past that come rushing back when we step into a similar moment in our present lives.

There are a couple temptations I’ve seen in myself in these moments. One is to return to that suffering. When the emotion arises again, I start wondering, “Maybe I was right to feel this way!” and then I start to spiral. This is a trap. It’s the trap of trusting my emotions rather than trusting in the wisdom God has given me about myself and reality.

Another temptation is to squash that memory. To quickly stifle it so that I don’t have to acknowledge that suffering. I say this is a temptation because like it or not, those memories of listening to Arcade Fire in the car while ruminating are a part of my story. And pretending they didn’t happen is a form of lying to myself.

A third temptation is avoidance. If this band evokes this memory, I’ll just avoid listening to Arcade Fire. In my experience, this makes your world smaller and smaller. For me, it would mean avoiding certain sidewalks! Not very practical.

Instead, in my humble opinion, I think the God honoring and healthy way forward is to accept that God has used those moments of suffering to bring me to where I am at today. Not to dwell on the suffering. This is very important. Not to reimagine the moment and relive it intentionally. But to briefly acknowledge that it happened, that it’s part of my life. “Oh, I remember that. Yep. That happened. Thank God for how I have grown since then. Moving on with my day now.” And then actually move on.

I want to reiterate, my focus here is not Traumatic events. I understand that they also involve flashbacks, but they are a different issue and one that I wouldn’t presume to speak on. But for those times in our lives where we are reminded of how depressed we once were, or how anxious we once were, or whatever, and we’re tempted to get pulled back in, in my experience (which is not as a mental health professional, to be clear) it’s been important to validate those experiences as part of my story, remind myself that God is working all things together for my good, and shift my attention back to the here and now.

That last part seems to me to be very important: shifting to the here and now. In the here and now we choose to engage in the activities and people and places that we find desirable (appropriately!) regardless of past memories that may come up. And when they come up, we notice them, wave hello, and return to the present. Because on the one hand our past did happen. To deny the past and pretend that our struggles never happened is to lie to ourselves. So we want to wave and acknowledge them. But we serve a God who heals and is working all things together for our good, so those past moments can never totally define us. They can affect us, but never totally define us. So we can turn to the future with confidence and allow the present to rewrite what this song or this sidewalk or this holiday means to us now. And it will happen, over time.

And when it does happen. When we get to the place where the sidewalk no longer reminds us of that moment of despair, that moment will not cease to be a part of our story, it will not disappear. It will not cease to be relevant. All the difficult, painful moments of our lives don’t become meaningless as we forget them. They remain woven into the story of our sanctification in Christ.