(Justin ⇒ Jasdev, 6/29/20)
So, one of my big points of embarrassment is that it’s been over a year since I’ve written on my personal newsletter. You prompted me to find something old and embarrassing, and dutifully I dove into the abysses of 2016 Justin’s myopia.
Here’s a fun one that caught my eye, from the spring of 2017. It’s a short one, and certainly presaged 2020’s Justin current capsule wardrobe — much to my partner’s chagrin, as she is the laundry-master of the household, I’m down to around twenty hangers’ worth of clothes and a smattering of not-so-neatly arranged tees and shorts.
The photo, though, is what keeps me thinking a bit:
It is perhaps the most boring photo in the world, and yet it spawns a flood of memories:
But the kicker to all of this is that I have absolutely no memory of any of this. No memory of writing the email; no memory of taking the picture; no memory of giving these clothes away. (To wit, I spent an hour last month digging through my clothes to try in vain to find that lime-and-blue tie.). I strain to think of what the apartment would have looked like just out of frame — my desk would be to the left, but I can’t remember what was on that bookshelf, nor how we arranged the living room or what I might have been making for dinner.
I am, perhaps, more concerned than your average citizen about my long-term memory. My friends and family all rightfully tease me, but there’s something a little shocking about how you can Ship-of-Theseus yourself away completely in a matter of mere years. You shared with me a (now-deleted, sorry readers) embarrassing tweet from 2013 Justin a few weeks back and I was mortified: mortified, sure, at the juvenilia I had espoused within it but more mortified that I couldn’t remember the tweet at all, couldn’t remember the version of my flesh that had written and sent it.
This has benefits, sure: I completely forgot about the webcomic that I was obsessed with at the time, and now I get to spend this coming weekend re-reading it.
But am I alone in this? Are you able to pretty strongly remember all of your past selves, or do you find yourself shocked every now and then at your personal lacunae?