Childhood Memories
I’ve found that I still have a lot of vivid snapshot memories from my childhood. Lots of stuff I hadn’t thought about in a very long time is still there, still swimming around in my head. Fragments of events long gone, lessons in impermanence, lessons in perspective, lessons in folly and wonder and futility and friendship and hope and love.
So I’ve been debating with myself. Do I give away the many small chapters of my life’s story, all the memorable things, all those banal snapshots, all those random images seared into my being? Or do I keep that part of myself private?
If I keep it private, I risk having what might be a wealth of instructive anecdotes from my childhood wither and fade, as I get ever farther removed from those experiences. But if I make those stories public, maybe I risk rendering my whole existence transparent and banal. Would I be better off reserving those stories for some discussion that I think they might be relevant to, even knowing that for many of them, that day will never come?
Are my formative memories fair game? Should they be as a masterwork on display for all to share? Or should they be precious gems hidden in the mattress, hoarded, known only to those we most trust, and only then in part? Would sharing that much about myself enhance or diminish my narrative?
I guess it comes down to a more fundamental question. As a person with a fairly rich intellectual life, how much of that do I want to really share with the world at large? Is there value in maintaining a certain mystique? And does that value outweigh the potential detriments of coming across as shallow by merely not exposing whatever depth is there? Is it better to be perceived as superficial, concealing the depths to which I might plunge, or to reveal both the full extent of my depths and, implicitly, the full extent of the limits of them?
I’m … still going back and forth on it.