Selective amnesia

The first six months of this year on the Isle of Man were miserable weather. Properly miserable, rain most days, damp, grey, the kind of weather that gets into your mood as much as your clothes. Then came nine or ten days of actual summer, sun, warmth, a decent breeze, the whole thing. And somehow those six months of rain barely register anymore. A handful of good days seems to have written straight over half a year of bad ones.

I've felt the same thing at sea, more times than I can count. Out on a long ocean crossing, it's rarely pleasant. Boring, rough, wet, too hot, too cold, never quite ideal. There's a version of me out there, every single time, absolutely certain I will never set foot on a yacht again. Then you arrive, sleep one proper night, wake up to a normal breakfast, orange juice, all of it, and the very first thing you want to do is take a yacht back out for a sail. The certainty from two days earlier has simply gone.

Driving through the Namib desert many years ago, the car got stuck often, the heat was relentless, nothing about it was comfortable in the moment. Looking back on it now, all I remember is thinking it was all fantastic.

There's a real line here worth being careful about, though. This selective amnesia seems to only apply to the things you actually chose. I chose that desert. I chose every ocean crossing, every mile of it, even the parts I hated while they were happening. That choice seems to be exactly what lets the memory soften afterwards, because some part of you always knew you could have stopped, and didn't. Trauma doesn't work that way. Trauma is what happens to you, not what you chose, and memory doesn't seem to forgive it the same way at all. The rough offshore and transatlantic races, those fade because you'd sign up for them again tomorrow. Something that happened to you against your will doesn't get that same mercy, and it shouldn't be expected to.

I don't think this is really about weather, or oceans, or deserts. I think it's about how badly memory keeps score, at least for the things we choose. The bad is real while it's happening, genuinely real, not imagined. But it decays fast, and the good, even a small amount of it, seems to overwrite it almost completely. That's a strange kind of luck if you think about it. It also means you probably can't trust your own memory of how bad a chosen hardship actually was, which cuts both ways. It's why people go back to the mountain, back to the ocean, back to the thing that nearly broke them the last time. Not because they've forgotten it was hard. Because they've forgotten how hard, and only the good part survived to tell the story.