Sometimes I wonder about my memory.
I can remember things from when I was a toddler.
Not everything, of course. But there are flashes…little scenes, feelings, places, people. Then my childhood becomes clearer. By the time I reach my teenage years, my memory almost feels like an old film reel that someone carefully preserved.
I remember people.
I remember conversations.
I remember where we were standing.
I remember what someone said that nobody else thought was important.
I remember the embarrassment, the excitement, the crushes, the friendships, the little dramas that felt enormous at the time.
I can tell you stories from high school as though they happened yesterday.
But then something strange happens.
I reach my twenties.
And suddenly, the film becomes thinner.
My thirties are even more compressed.
It feels like a collection of major events rather than individual days.
I know I lived those years. Of course I did.
I worked.
I got married.
I built a family.
I became a mother.
I changed jobs.
I experienced successes and disappointments.
I made decisions that shaped the person I am today.
But if someone asks me to describe an ordinary day from my twenties, I sometimes struggle.
Where was I sitting?
What did my room look like?
What did I do after work?
Who was beside me?
What did we talk about?
Sometimes I know the answer in broad strokes, but the actual scene doesn’t come.
And yet, ask me about something that happened when I was sixteen, and suddenly I can see it.
The terrace.
The boarding house.
The people around me.
The boy I had a crush on.
The things nobody else knew.
It’s almost absurd.
Why does my brain preserve a random afternoon from adolescence while apparently throwing away hundreds of ordinary days from adulthood?
Maybe the answer is that not all memories are stored in the same way.
Our younger years are filled with firsts.
First crushes.
First heartbreaks.
First friendships that feel like forever.
First experiences of independence.
First embarrassing mistakes.
First realizations about who we are.
Those experiences are emotionally loud.
They help build our identity.
They become stories.
And stories are easier to remember than routines.
My twenties, on the other hand, may have been filled with repetition.
Work.
Commute.
Responsibilities.
Relationships.
Bills.
Family.
Work again.
There were important moments, certainly. But perhaps many days looked too much like the days before them and the days after them.
When life becomes repetitive, individual days lose their edges.
The years become a blur.
Maybe that’s why I remember my teenage years as scenes but my adulthood as chapters.
I remember what happened in my twenties.
I just don’t always remember what it felt like to be there on an ordinary Tuesday.
There is another possibility I find even more interesting.
Perhaps my teenage memories survived because I kept revisiting them.
We tell stories about our younger selves.
We laugh about old crushes.
We remember the ridiculous things we did.
We talk about the people who once mattered to us.
Every time we tell a story, we bring the memory back to life.
We polish it.
We attach new meaning to it.
We see our younger selves through the eyes of the person we have become.
That’s probably why some memories from decades ago feel more alive than something that happened five years ago.
The old memories have been visited.
The newer ones may simply be waiting.
Sometimes I wonder whether my adult years are really as empty of memories as they seem.
Perhaps they’re not gone.
Perhaps I simply don’t have the right keys to unlock them.
Maybe I need a song.
A photograph.
An old address.
A former colleague’s name.
The smell of a particular food.
The layout of an old house.
A school uniform.
A workplace.
A particular road I used to travel every day.
And suddenly, maybe the door opens.
A scene comes back.
Not necessarily an important one.
Maybe just an ordinary afternoon.
Maybe me sitting somewhere, younger and unaware of how quickly that particular version of my life would disappear.
There is something bittersweet about that.
We spend our adulthood accumulating experiences, often believing that we’ll remember them.
But life moves so quickly that many ordinary days disappear without leaving a clear record.
Perhaps that is why childhood memories can feel so precious.
They remind us that we were once people who experienced life slowly.
A summer seemed endless.
A school year felt enormous.
A crush could last four years.
A friendship could feel like the center of the universe.
A single afternoon could become a story we carried for decades.
Then adulthood arrives.
And suddenly, ten years can feel like one paragraph.
Maybe I don’t need to be frightened by the gaps in my memory.
Maybe I should simply become curious about them.
Instead of asking, “Why can’t I remember my twenties?”
I can ask:
“What is still hiding there?”
Because perhaps those years aren’t gone.
Perhaps they are simply quiet.
Waiting for the right song, the right photograph, the right name, the right smell—or the right question, to bring them back.
And maybe one day, I’ll discover that my twenties and thirties weren’t really blank at all.
They were just written in a different ink.
