For years I forgot about me. Or, more specifically, about the me I was my first three years of college. Forgot about the spunky English nerd, the athlete, the overly naive freshman with picky eating habits. Forgot about the hard-wrought confidence I didn’t leave Oregon over four years ago without first burying with doubt, fear and insecurity, cozy in the new meek of my own making.

When we moved this past Winter, and again this past month, I found myriad items once treasured that I had forgotten even existed. Parts of me mixed with boxes and scraps of trash.

Before I had time to re-lace my favorite Doc Marten’s, I was transported to a college dorm room with stained blue carpet and two twin beds. To a time I was struggling to define myself amidst a sea of insecure and outspoken faces. To a time I was struggling to define friendship, and what it meant to be loyal to another woman, while simultaneously vying for the attention of myriad men.

The certainty of that sacred and yet left behind time and space, the unexpected visitation of emotions I had bubble-wrapped, boxed, and sealed years ago, rushing back unexpectedly from a faded and torn photograph–a barely readable concert ticket stub–stole my breath from my chest, and I sat immobile and quiet for what felt like hours.

Over the years, almost unconsciously, I have become a memory collector.

Ever since I can recall thinking that I wanted to remember parts of me I knew I wouldn’t be able to carry with me always–brazen and fuzzy memories, intentional and unintentional–I have kept notes, journal entries, receipts from trips long taken, pictures that at first glance seem obscure, insignificant even. For me they serve as doorways to years fraught with recollections of lost souls posing as shiny happy people. Doorways to years I learned most about myself, to years I battled with my ideals and the beginnings of my personal and professional ambitions. Doorways to defining moments, some bright and some admittedly less wonderful to remember.

Good or bad, they are doorways to pieces of myself, and, most of the time, even when some might look (and have looked) at me like I’m crazy, I have no desire let them go. Not fully. Not ever. Because just like it’s impossible to separate Melissa Gilbert from Lifetime movies, it’s impossible to separate the me I’ve come to know and (am working hard to continually) love from my past.

I can ignore it, sure, but it sits there still, resilient against all of my well-intentioned ambitions to eradicate it from my memory, from my story-telling. My past shaped me, fought me, taught me what it means to breathe, both painfully and easily.

Without painful, easy has no context; without a past, I don’t exist.

I am surely not the same socially bipolar girl I was so many years ago, teetering on the edge of fine, sometimes confident, but mostly afraid, looking over my shoulder to watch people I assumed would judge me, and some who surely did.

I am not her, but I remember her.

Remembering allows me to feel proud of who I have become, of who I am still becoming.

Remembering allows me to be patient with myself, to mentally re-traverse the many miles I’ve stumbled and sometimes even walked upright, all to eventually arrive at a here and now that is so sincerely blissful that sometimes it feels fabricated.

Remembering allows me to realize it isn’t.

(Inspired by this thought-provoking post. And, more recently, this one, too. )