The forgetting

So last night, I watched The Forgotten (2004). It's been on my "want to watch" list since it came out, but I was never feeling in the right mood. It's not worth trying to find a synopsis, or read the reviews. This is an experience film, a thinking film.

This is what I got out of it: We, as humans, live our lives to survive, and sometimes survival means forgetting the suffering and pain that we have experienced. We do this because it's easier. We do this because pain is painful.

But to truly be human, to accept our humanness, is to accept the pain, and not wish it away. It is to feel the full depth of our emotions and feel the horror of waking up each day with the same loss we went to sleep with.

Being human is a painful thing. There is constant loss, and the easiest way to survive is to forget and move on. We forget with alcohol, with drugs, with sex, disassociation, and a myriad of other things. Forgetting is ideal. We pray to forget. There was a time in the past few months when I considered forgetting, when I was encouraged by loved ones to forget. But each time I thought about that prayer, I said [to God], "I'd rather feel the pain, than ever forget the beauty."

I have been told that my "recycling ethic" is about more than surfacey stuff, that in addition to bottles and cans and old clothes, I also refuse to throw away my past. I refuse to stop acknowledging that my past happened, that my life has happened exactly as it has. It isn't pretty, but it's real; and I would rather feel it than ever give it up, because in the giving-up, I throw away parts of myself. And some of these parts are inextricably linked to beauty.

So I choose to not forget, even when it hurts. Because I don't ever want to be without the things that made me, me, no matter how ugly some of them are.