Memories that Haunt Us (On Facticity)

One of the most difficult and puzzling of experiences in life relates to memories, both short term and long.

Short term "memories" like dreams speak volumes of knowledge and ideas to us in a relatively short amount of time. The following morning, we are left trying to dissect or understand the meaning of the dream(s), if we remember them and/or if they were interesting enough to analyze.

Other perplexing short term memories could be your day- or parts of your day- playing back in your mind as you're preparing to fall asleep in bed. All is calm and quiet, or you're tuned into the white noise of the atmosphere, and suddenly your brain plays an event from the day that leaves you feeling... not good. Maybe you felt dumb, embarrassed, shy, unprofessional, or something that just doesn't reflect good on you, at least according to your perception of the event.

Then, there are other memories, like that time from 10 years ago when you overshared something with someone, or when you meant to do well and something turned to disaster. I've had a lot of these memories recently. Embarrassed by my youth, ignorance, and silly mistakes of my teenage years, or occasionally something further back or more recent.

It's easy to develop some negative associations when that happens. It's easy to begin charting event after event where you "connect the dots" of your embarrassing or haunting stories, and then you try and draw conclusions. Sometimes those are dangerous conclusions, like believing that you, as an individual, are just a mistake or a mess up, a chronic failure.

Much like journeying through a field frequently enough forms a path, it's easy to build these pathways in our mind that can lead us to darker or more difficult conclusions. What started as a memory connected to other memories, and that formed a pathway, and from that pathway forged a retrospective identity that we apply ourselves today. "I was a mess up then, and I'm a mess up now," it can feel easy to convince ourselves, or, at least, myself.

It was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger that first introduced me to the idea facticity. Facticity is a fun word to say (pronounced fack-tiss-ity), but it carries with it important meaning. Facticity generally means "the fact-ness of something," which might not be helpful, so let me try and provide an example.

Heidegger uses the word facticity in relation to his idea of thrownness. By that I mean, we (everyone) finds themselves thrown into a world they did not asked to be thrown into. You just showed up! But when you were born, you were born into a world you could not have planned for. You were born to parents with a particular education, you were born into a social class, you were born with access to things that not everyone has equal access to, and so much more. There were literally thousands and thousands of years of human existence that predated your existence, and those thousands of years constructed a world that you were suddenly brought into. You were born into a world with electricity, but hundreds of years ago you wouldn't have been. Things like that make up this idea of facticity: that many circumstances (facts) of your life contributed and enabled your being.

Would you be who you are if you didn't have access to the internet, magazines, books, an automobile, or other things? Sure, there might be some thing about you that may be the same, but the material conditions that shaped your life would have made you a very different person in a different time or place.

Moving on, facticity is one of my favorite ideas. It's something I fall back on regularly in life, and this is why:

All of your life, up to this very moment, is settled business. When your near future becomes now, what is now, will be settled business. Everything you have done and who you have been until this moment is now a fact. There is not anything we can do to change these facts, but, much like we cannot change the world we have been brought into or how it influenced us, we similarly cannot change that our past has made us who we presently are.

Who I was and how I acted resulted in consequences, and those consequences, big or small, somehow contributed to my being here now and typing these words to you. My past and my memories, even the ones that haunt me, are my own facticity.

I have spent a lot of time getting lost in my thoughts and memories. I've scoured them and analyzed them every possible direction, digging deeper and deeper, trying to get to the center of the existential Tootsie Roll Pop. In the end though, I feel like I have only one real conclusion: accept it and move on.

There is no benefit in laboring over the past, or past mistakes. There is no value in recounting every fine detail and subjecting myself to the cringe and pain of my mistakes. The lesson to be learned from this is simple: "I made a mistake. I know the mistake I made. I know how to avoid this mistake. The only thing I can do now is to do it differently next time it comes around." That's the end of it. I accept my own facticity and I move on. I can either live in ignorance and suffer the same fate or learn from it and do differently next time. It's easier, and much kinder to yourself, to accept and move on. Living in the past gets you nowhere.

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I had a moment this week where I was mentally confronted by some horrendous anxiety over some conversations I had recently had. I was concerned a few things I said could have been misinterpreted, or taken the wrong way. This attack came during a highly inopportune time when I was out with friends, and could have ruined my evening.

I felt a very strong compulsion at the time to hike down those mental trails and reconsider every word I had said, or imagine how I could try and "fix it" the next day with a thousand word written explanation. It was almost like it was an open armed invitation to self-destruct and ruin what was otherwise set to be an excellent evening.

In the end, however, I told myself it didn't matter. If my words were misunderstood, I could clarify them at a different time. If I had by some accidental chance rubbed someone or something the wrong way, I could address it and apologize, but not at time and place where my anxiety struck me. Another time that was appropriate. Nothing was said or expressed by anyone- the whole ordeal was a mental horror film I conjured up.

Our life is what it is. We can't change our past or our memories, but we can change our relationship to our past and memories, and change ourselves to be better. That's the value of facticity.