Forgetful Em, and Learning How to Love Her.

Originally published January 2018.

Learning to live with our own flaws can be a hard process. Today Forgetful Em showed her face and I wrote out some thoughts about my experience learning to love parts of myself that annoy the crap out of me. 

*Disclaimer I didn’t edit this at all so it is probably struggling grammatically.

I almost got in about 5 wrecks at one double lane backwards roundabout yesterday on the way back to Christchurch. They are the most confusing thing ever. People are coming from everywhere and your brain can’t process roundabouts very well when everything about them is reversed. People were honking and throwing middle fingers (probably),

but surprisingly I wasn’t that stressed. Normally things like that would elevate my heartrate a ton, but I was just like “whoops” and eventually went on my way.

We survived and made it to the botanical gardens at Christchurch, drove around for a while until we were finally able to snag a parking spot. We walked for a bit, through trees and flower gardens, some of which were familiar, some of which I had never seen before.

Danielle and Lucas peeled off to go get lunch, and I continued walking around by myself, one of my favorite ways to exist in the world. I walked into the Christchurch museum, which had an awesome National Geographic photography exhibit, with 50 of the greatest photos in National Geographic history, with their backgrounds and stories underneath. There were tears. Shocker.

Then I went and waited in line for a coffee that I ended up not buying because it was too expensive, and then I walked back to the van to make some lunch, which consisted of a picnic of spicy thai chili tuna and crackers (quite good), hummus and crackers, hummus and carrot, etc. Lots of hummus. Things go bad pretty quickly here because of the no preservatives thing, so you can’t stretch things without refrigeration like you can in the states, thus the smaller packages of things and almost everything saying “use within two days or freeze.” So, lots of hummus on everything because I bought a big thing of it that is about to go bad.

I met the K’s at pack n save, our go to grocery store thus far. We grabbed backpacking food for the Meuller Hut, and then we headed to the library to use the free wifi and charge everything up before heading out tomorrow.

And then, Forgetful Em decided to join us at the library.

I had a mini scare with my passport… where at one point in the past week I tried to help future me out by putting my passport somewhere where it would be more safe, only for future me (now present me today) to forget where that was. So I semi-frantically search my entire bag, and basically the entire van, my mind racing with how complicated it would be to replace my passport and documents….only to come back in and check my bag a fifth time and find it all in a tiny pocket that had somehow overlooked for the past 20 minutes of scrambling.

Good job past me. You hid it so well even I couldn’t find it.

I feel like I’m a fairly intelligent person, but I am literally the most forgetful person I have ever met. My awareness of sensory detail is terrible. So many times, I will do something with my physical body (like put my passport in that tiny pocket) while my consciousness is deep in my mind, where it resides probably 70% of the day, and when my consciousness is in that deep place, everything that goes on around me has a giant chance to be missed.

Ask any of my close friends how scared they are sometimes when I’m driving… I get so far in my mind that connection to the outside world shuts off and I no longer see red lights or speed bumps until the very last second and I time travel back to the present moment just in time to slam on the brakes… I wish it wasn’t true, but unfortunately that is me through and through.

Or like today at dinner I looked for our little trashcan everywhere, and it was literally two feet away from me… It’s like I have a perspective problem where the moment I intend on finding something I will see every single detail in the setting around me but that very thing I’m looking for.

It’s cruel really. Like the universe plays these tricks on me all the time just to get a good laugh.

I used to get so angry with myself when I would misplace something, or not see something, or go to the grocery store only to get there and remember that the very detailed shopping list I spent thirty minutes making is sitting on the kitchen table with the sharpie probably topless beside it because I forgot to put the top back on too.

It was like the second that Forgetful Em showed up I would just unleash a thousand arrows of self hatred on her to try to finally kill her off.

But those holes I would leave in her would only make room for shame to creep its way in, and she’s a part of me, so I would be filled with shame as well.

At some point, probably at some point on my trip out west in 2015, when I spent a LOT of time alone, I got tired of getting so mad at myself all the time. I got tired of spending so much energy being my own bully, following Forgetful Em around corners only to shove her head in the toilet and give her a good swirlie when she did that embarrassing annoying thing again.

I remember thinking, Why am I so hard on myself? I would never even think about saying these hurtful things to another person, so why do I think it’s okay to say these hurtful things to myself?

I was tired of feeling so shameful all the time of my forgetfulness. It took so much work to keep hating forgetful Em.

So, I changed my perspective and tried to find something endearing in that part of my personality.

Slowly, and I mean slowly, I began to respond to Forgetful Em with compassion. Instead of responding with “OH MY GOSH HOW CAN YOU BE SO STUPID” I started responding by simply saying to myself, “Well, there goes Forgetful Em again. She sure can’t remember anything, but what would we do without her?”

Which sounds, so dumb. I know.

But when I intentionally made myself change my thought patterns every time I would forget something or misplace something or get all of the things at the grocery store except the most important ingredient,

when I replaced self-hatred with compassion, the frustration and anger eventually dissapated, and I can now respond to those moments without having a meltdown and ruining my entire day because heaven forbid an authentic part of myself showed her face.

Yes of course,  the compassion was forced in the beginning. When you’re used to self-deprecation and shaming it doesn’t feel natural to find parts of yourself endearing.

But over time, it becomes less forced and more natural, until you reach the point where you don’t think twice before responding with “Lol, Oh Forgetful Em, what are we going to do with ya?” instead of “FORGETFUL EM I F***ING HATE YOU.”

Believe me, the former is much more pleasant and doesn’t rob your day of so much joy.

Now ideally I would love to reach a place in my life where I could maybe start reversing my forgetfulness, but no matter how hard I try to leave my keys in their designated place for two weeks straight, that 15th day when I forgot to put them on the hook will be the day that I need them the most, and I will spend thirty minutes looking for them and end up finding them in the most random place ever, like the refrigerator or something (yep, that happened once, but it was with my phone),

And I’ve learned to accept that that’s just how it’s going to be. And I might change a little, might get better about remembering to put grocery lists in my pocket directly after I make them, but Forgetful Em will always be a part of me, (public apology to every significant person in my life because I know you have to deal with her too)

so I might as well find compassion for her instead of hate.

What if we tried to do this with all of our flaws and faults, all of the annoying parts of our personalities that we can’t stand.

Or even more crazy, what if we tried to do this with our partners? Intentionally saught the endearment in our partners’ flaws instead of responding in rage because they left their damn dirty socks on the bathroom floor AGAIN.

Or even CRAZIER, what if we did this with our family? With our parents when we go home for the holidays after living on our own for quite some time now?

I’m by zero means a pro at any of this. I still have my days where Forgetful Em shows up and I lose my freaking mind because I’m so frustrated. But I have seen the transformation in my mental health by simply dedicating all of my energy to finding one aspect of myself, Forgetful Em, endearing instead of repulsive. And I encourage you to find one aspect of your personality that you don’t like (which for 99% of the population will probbably take a maximum of 5 seconds), and Instead of throwing all of those arrows of self-hatred at yourself leaving you all holey and vulnerable to shame, but the dang bow down and start patching yourself up. You gotta live with yourself forever, so you might as well learn how to live inside that body with all of you in a healthy way–

the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, the whole and the broken, the responsible

And the forgetful.