Observation on the forgotten past

I've been creating a timeline of my past over the past few years trying to recapture old memories I lost after having a stroke. The problem is, how to remember what I have forgotten.

So I started with my poetry. I am fortunate that down through the years I wrote the dates on the poems as I wrote them and since 2001 I have been posting them on line as I was writing, so this has provided me with a template to work with since I was in high school. I also have a work history/resume of every job I've held since around the same time and another list of where I have lived. This has helped me immeasurably to keep things in perspective. I also have many digital and handwritten journal entries and notes I kept pertaining to many of my poems that help to fill in the blanks about what I was doing at the time of writing poems and who inspired them. But I still have many holes to fill.

There are gaps where I have no recollection of what I was doing with my life. For instance, there is over 10 years from 1990 until 2001 when I wrote next to nothing and remember very little from the years prior to 1990 all the way back to when I left college in 1984. It's almost as if I didn't exist for about 17 years except for my poetry. All I'm really sure of is that I was deeply depressed and thought about suicide on many occasions. I found a couple of suicide notes that seem pretty clear I was going to do it and various notes begging God to not let me wake up the next day. I wonder if I just don't want to remember or if the pathways to hose memories were damaged from the stroke, or something else.

The other day I was writing a response to a comment on my poem "I am Tapestry" which I wrote last April but added an audio recording to a couple of days ago. Here's what I wrote:
"I don't usually use tv shows as inspirations for poems, but in his case it reflected my life so perfectly I just had to. I had watched the show last spring again on Netflix and it hit me all over again just like it did 23 years ago and the next thing you know I was writing a poem. I don't know why I didn't write a poem back then.  
  
Hmm, I just went to look at my chronological list of poems and I discovered something odd and interesting. I did not write any poems in 1993. In fact I only wrote 19 poems in the entire decade of the 1990's. I was deeply depressed during those years so it makes sense. My mind and my life was a mess and often considered suicide during those years. I wasn't able to write poetry and didn't care about it or any part of my life. I don't remember much of what was happening back then but what I do was unpleasant and I kinda wish I could forget most of that. Only the last couple of years in the 90's had any happiness, but only in brief spurts that I can recall.  
  
Usually my poetry is my method of venting, but my muse left me at a critical time in my life. I almost didn't make it through. In January of 1996 I was diagnosed with diabetes and high blood pressure and that was causing a cascade of other health issues. That only made my depression all the worse. Looking back at that list of poems just now put a lot of things about my life in perspective that I hadn't thought about before. I'm lucky to be here now to create more poetry and try to enjoy life after having lost so many years to depression and hopelessness. Those were dark times in many ways, some so dark I can't see through the veil today...  "

I looked it up to see exactly when that episode aired and it was February 13, 1993, almost 24 years ago, interestingly just 2 days after my mother's 63'rd birthday and the day before Valentine's day, yet the only thing I remember is the tv show.

In addition to the 19 poems I wrote in the 90's, I only wrote 2 poems in the last half of the year 2000. Then I went on a bit of a creative burst when I fell in love with my aerobics instructor, only to crash and burn when she rather suddenly married another guy. But that's another story altogether. I'm still trying to put together the pieces of a 17 year black-hole in time and the shades of gray around the edges...

JJ

https://deepundergroundpoetry.com/poems/210332-poems-chronilogically-written/