#220: When forgetting is good

A case for moving on

My first job out of college was as an office manager for a tech startup that helped businesses run sweepstakes on Facebook. The office was stocked with junk food and strewn with Razor scooters I purchased in bulk to boost morale. My job required a little of everything: onboarding new hires, managing the CEO’s calendar, ordering pizza when our accounts team hit their sales goals. I managed to find this role very stressful, sometimes crying in meetings with my manager because I felt like an intern for every employee simultaneously. But I also thought I had a dream job (see: Razor scooters), so whenever I missed college—and I missed it badly—I assumed I’d miss it forever. In my memory, that year was marked by the recurring thump of the realization that this was it. I’d worked throughout high school and college, but this was different. This was full-time, and I’d be doing it from here on out. It was a terrifying thought I circled constantly.

Then something interesting happened: I forgot about college. I can’t remember exactly when, and it had nothing to do with finding a better job or figuring out critical aspects of my adult life, but by my mid-twenties, I no longer thought about school. I definitely wanted to enjoy my career more, but the very fact of full-time work no longer felt like a preposterous imposition. Of course I worked all day for five days a week, got two off, then went back. So did all my friends! This shift wasn’t conscious, but in hindsight I can clearly see how important it was that I lose emotional touch with college life in order to earn a living in relative peace: forgetting as a form of hedonic adaptation.

I’ve been thinking of that time because, a year and a half into motherhood, it’s happening again. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not have a kid. I forget so much about it that I feel incapable of missing it in a tangible way. I miss aspects of my “freedom” in theory—like a lazy Sunday, maybe—but I can’t actually recall what they felt like or get back in touch with who I was when I had them. If you’d warned me of this consciousness split in early motherhood, or before I had a kid, I probably would have panicked. Falling off the cliff of parenthood and “losing” my former self seemed like the surest path to misery. Now it feels distinctly like the opposite was true.

“I didn’t want to lose anything. That was the main problem,” Sarah Manguso writes on the opening page of Ongoingness, her short book about learning to let herself forget things. She long fears being “lost in time,” until finally she realizes (as I’ve quoted once before), “the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life.” In recent years, I’ve grappled with this idea a lot—of forgetting as a cost, a sacrifice we make at the altar of presence. But until recently, I’d never thought of forgetting as a kind of gift, without which we may never be able to truly move forward. Once I started seeing it that way, supporting examples seemed to multiply.

I’ve been considering the subtle forgetting required to heal from grief, or weather difficult transitions, or grant forgiveness (and ask for it). I’ve thought of our collective obsession with “time” as a healer, and the extent to which that simply entails forgetting. I’ve thought about forgetting the pain of childbirth—then having another. I’ve thought of Abigail Bruley, a young woman I once profiled who lost many of her memories in a car crash, and most of the trappings of her former life along with them. While interviewing her, I was devastated by the idea of her loss and captivated by her apparent indifference: It was hard to mourn something she couldn’t remember, she told me then.

In A Primer for Forgetting, scholar and critic Lewis Hyde explores the idea that forgetting can be as useful as remembering—and that, in fact, the two are not opposed but work in concert with each other. This idea sparked for him when he was studying the importance of memory, and in reading about the old oral cultures who passed knowledge through word of mouth, he learned they kept themselves in balance “by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.” The idea struck him as provocative during a time (2019) in which people employed paranoid levels of documentation. He eventually came to see forgetting as a vital human function that bestows “imaginative freedom.”

I haven’t read Hyde’s book in full, but its free-associative style makes it easy to flip through. He points to the many great thinkers who have revered this tension: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Freud, Proust, Perec. Nietzsche referred to forgetting not as a biological inevitability but as a “positive faculty of repression”—a sort of protective filter for the psyche. Proust, obsessed with memories as he was, understood they “carry their redemptive force only because they have been at first forgotten”—and thus enable the very making of art. The musician John Cage, who famously composes “indeterminate” music (i.e. open to chance), has suggested we must forget so that we can “open our minds to possibilities other than the ones we remember.” There is also the fundamental fact that memories exist only in contrast to what’s been forgotten. As philosopher Paul Ricoeur put it: “Forgetting is not the opposite of memory, but its condition.”

Obviously, in certain circumstances, forgetting can be morally and ethically fraught. In today’s political climate, you’ll find readily available proof that “forgetting” history can produce catastrophic results. Likewise it can wreak havoc on our personal lives: forgotten lessons, forgotten values, forgotten priorities. It can be double-edged, too: Forgetting my college lifestyle may have helped me adjust at 21, but I was also onto something about the inhumanity of modern full-time work. Regardless, in cases where forward movement is crucial, Hyde believes in the possibility of forgetting without erasing. He explores the etymology of the word forget: to abstain from holding on. To let go. “Only when it operates in concert with memory can forgetting clear new ground without foreclosing the past,” he writes. He calls this “active forgetting”—a conscious bid for forward movement.

This March, I took a trip to London to visit some friends. When I booked my flight, I noted that it was exactly two years after my last trip to London, which was an iconically good time and also (literally) the last thing I did before I got pregnant. This year’s trip happened to be my first time traveling away from Sunny, so the two excursions felt like poetic bookmarks around the most significant transformation of my life. I privately hoped this return to London would incite a transcendent return to my former self, as I’d been feeling especially exhausted and alienated in its lead-up. It didn’t. It was a great time, but there was no profound click of spiritual reunion. I felt normal. Different from last time, maybe, but not in a way that seemed legible. I spent the last day spiraling about something I couldn’t identify at the time, although now I might be ready.

2023 vs 2025. Less blonde now but inexplicably still interested in documenting the tube

Upon reflection, the real poetry of the trip was that in booking it—in trying to recover some “lost” aspect of myself—I’d missed an event back in Brooklyn that approached my problem completely differently. It was called a “Maiden Funeral,” and I’d been invited by a woman I met at the playground. She’d texted me the invite, a purple flyer with a somber illustration of a flower. “You’re invited to honor and mourn who you were before becoming a parent,” it read. “In this no-cost, ritualized discussion group and celebration, we’ll aim to release the parts of ourselves that are no longer accessible in parenthood by celebrating what they were and honoring what is now here in their place.” When I read it, I immediately clocked that my former self would have found it corny. Now it sounded like the perfect plan. Actually, kind of punk?

Hyde might call a Maiden Funeral a form of “active forgetting”—an intentional and respectful loosening of one’s grip on the past in favor of embracing the present. In this light, I wonder if the anxiety I experienced on my final day in London was my subconscious reckoning with the fact that I was trying to move forward by going back, by refusing to forget. It’s not that I think the trip was a mistake (it was very fun), only that my expectations while planning it were potentially misplaced. There is no “return to self” in store for me. If I can manage to accept that, I may actually have a shot at the transcendence I’m after.

The natural process of forgetting has ushered me into motherhood whether or not I agreed to it. At worst, it’s made me feel wistful for something I’ve lost full sight of, like an old photo out of focus. More often, it’s made me feel normal and steady again, full of ordinary joys and gripes, no longer living on “another planet,” the way I so often felt that first year. Maybe more accurately, I made the new planet home. Now that I’m here, I’m less interested in comparing the two than I thought I’d be—not only is my memory now fading, but the results don’t really matter. As someone obsessed with record-keeping, this feels like the perfect cosmic joke. Anything worth preserving will carry over incidentally, and has, and the rest will fade away, making room for more.

The most interesting article I read last week was “What Parents of Boys Should Know,” by Joshua Coleman for The Atlantic. Last Friday’s 15 things also included a genius house plant accessory, a deep-dive on Quince 👀, a weird eating poll, and more. The rec of the week was SHORTS (and how to wear them). ‘Tis the season.

Hot topic: Regarding boys & girls

Last Wednesday’s discussion thread was about “gender disappointment” and its many complexities. I had no idea this would spark such a huge, multifaceted discussion! I genuinely have much more complicated and nuanced opinions on the matter than I did going into it. Thank you so much for weighing in. Catch up on the 235 comments here.

Hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley