People grow up all around me. People who were with me at one point in my journey fall behind or surpass me. We shared a part of our journey together, and then we moved onto another part of journey separately. I know I shouldn’t hold onto all of these memories that I have, but I do. People come in and out of your life. Some experiences that you share cannot be unexperienced. Friendship and relationships only move forward, not backwards.
I think a core difference in how I see connection is that most people perceive it to be linear. Most people evaluate intimacy isolated at each given moment of time, considering only the here and now with limited consideration of the past. I think differently. I evaluate each episode of intimacy in context to its own body of work, with consideration of the past and autocorrelated factors. Each person represents a collection of memories. I access these memories each time I think or interact with a person. We all suffer from recency bias, but I think I tend to do so less than others when it comes to intimacy. I’ve noticed that people only reflect upon that latest instance in which you have interacted with someone, where I think of a person relative to all of the interactions we have had. Perhaps this is due to my better-than-average memory — it’s certainly not storage-efficient to index memory like this — that I archive the memory of every person based on all of the interactions we have ever had.
The way I process information is deeply visual. Some of my friends remember conversations extremely well, or details like EPS for a company two quarters ago, but I don’t remember these things well. I remember feelings and images, although I don’t know how accurate these memories things are. I am able to keep detailed impressions of people I meet in my head. People live in my head as representation of every interaction we have had. I understand that it is not reflective of the person they are now because the interactions I have had are deeply contextual to the time in which we shared experiences. These people are afterimages. They exist in the space of visual memory as a corpus without a body.
People change, but they don’t change in my head. I have an outdated version of them in my mind. Yet, these versions of people in the past continue to inspire me and push my personality forward today. I’ve often heard of the upward-spiraling loop as a parallel to the Christian ethos of striving to be more like Jesus, and this is my version of it. I create idealized versions of people in my past and strive towards becoming more like them. I’m not sure if this is healthy, to be honest, but this is just how I do things. People come and go in my life. The version of them that I interacted with remains in my head. This is how I grow.
shades of gwei 