Teaching myself to remember my face

The tyranny of the remembering self

There are entire months I cannot account for. Time folds in on itself, like freshly washed linen packed too tightly in a box. I forget birthdays. I forget what I looked like at seventeen. I forget how long grief has lived in the house with me. I forget to respond to messages. But more frightening than any of this is the slow forgetting of myself-not just the events I’ve passed through, but the shape of me within them. My voice. My gaze. My own laughter.

What does it mean to forget your own face?

I remember in pieces. Small, everyday things haunt you if you let them. If you remember them long enough, they make you feel like you’re walking through your own skin again.

The ache in my chest when my grandmother said my name like a blessing. The smell of my mother’s kitchen.

There is no clear chronology, just flashes. Memory, for me, is not a photograph. It’s water. It moves. It disappears when I try to grip it. But I’ve started learning how to let it flow instead, how to witness rather than capture.

One day, I woke up from a fever dream with a phrase that settled into my chest: “teaching myself to not forget my face.” It startled me, not because I understood it, but because I didn’t. It revealed a quiet loss I hadn’t named.

Since then, I have started a practice. Not journaling or archiving, but simply noticing. When a memory arrives, I sit with it. I do not interrogate it. I let it hum quietly in the room with me. I remind myself to let these moments rest beside me, not inside me, and to trust that they will return when I need them.

I’m 32 now. I don’t know when that started to feel like a threshold, but lately I’ve been wondering if remembering is not a passive function but a muscle-one we can train, or allow to atrophy. What if forgetting is not a flaw, but a signal?

In the research that’s shaped this reflection, I return often to ideas about inherited memory, embodied knowledge, and what it means to carry rather than recall. What if memory lives in our backs, our knees, our voices? What if the body remembers what the mind refuses to name?

I think of the ache in my legs after I dance to old songs. I think of the way I cry at the smell of rain on parched soil. I think of how some part of me relaxes when I’m called by my Igbo name, like a thread being untangled.

Sometimes I eat the same thing over and over again, as a kind of reverence. I want to memorize the first feeling, the first joy, before it fades. Each repetition, a small anchoring.

In the 1953 film Statues Also Die, the narrator says, “When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art.” I think memory lives somewhere between those two. Not history. Not art. But something tender, unrecorded, breathing quietly.

Sometimes I fear I am becoming a statue of myself-admired, referenced, hollow. Still, I remind myself that I am not fixed. I am a living thing. I am a woman still teaching herself how to return.

I am keeping a loose, unsorted list of things that remind me who I am:

• The way plantains hiss when dropped into oil

• My name, “Kamnelechukwu,” said with laughter

• A prayer whispered in Igbo

• The sound of wooden chairs scraping tiled floors

• Palm oil staining the edges of a plastic plate

• Afternoons where nothing happens, and that is enough

I don’t write these down to preserve them. I write to be near them. These are not archives. They are mirrors.

Daniel Kahneman once said that we don’t really choose between experiences, but between memories of experiences, and even our visions of the future are often imagined as memories we hope to have. He called it the tyranny of the remembering self.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot-how easy it is to live in anticipation or reflection, instead of in the moment itself. How often I’ve dragged myself through something just so I could say I’d done it. How rarely I pause to simply witness-myself or others.

No one taught me how to remember with softness. No one told me it was a practice. That memory could be devotional. That it could be a way back to myself, instead of a courtroom where I interrogate the past.

So now, when I feel a memory arriving-uninvited, often-I don’t flinch. I try to sit beside it. I try to let it speak. I try to listen without correction.

Some days, that’s the only work I do: I am not trying to be whole. I am only trying to be here. To be a little more with myself, a little more of myself. To find, slowly, the edges of my face again.

And when I do-in the reflection on a bus window, in the sound of my name said by someone who knows me-I say: there you are. I missed you.

I’m currently working on a photo series titled “Teaching Myself to Remember My Face.” It’s been the honour of my life to do it-a quiet, stubborn, sacred act of returning. Some days the images come clearly. Other days, I wait for them. But I trust that memory, like light, always finds its way back.

If this piece stirred something in you-a memory, a feeling, a quiet recognition-I invite you to respond. What are the small, unsorted things that remind you who you are? Share one with me.