If Memory is a Trick Mirror, Art is a True One

artistic and behavioral tools for cultivating a happy life ☼ pride in mexico city ☼ the meaning of pride ☼ questions from a neurodivergent brain

Jul 12, 2024

Is youth a synonym for happiness? When I open the drawers of my brain and inspect the decades prior, everything appears shiny and new. There is a surge of joy I get when I pick up a memory and place it in my heart. The motor kicks in, the lights flicker on, and events replay in a haze, their images more refined by emotions than facts: euphoria and novelty set in a time when I lived there, or loved them, or did not know what tomorrow looked like (no matter how hard I tried). What follows when the memory ends is an ethereal longing for the ability to recreate it, to crawl inside of a time back then, the way dreams wrap around us and ignite a new reality, even if only for a few hours.

Nineteen. Twenty-one. Twenty-four. When I think about the happiest moments of my life, they lack temporal shape. Instead, they span days, months, or years: When I studied abroad in Sweden with a group of new friends, when I moved into a house full of twenty-somethings in Mexico City, when I spent a summer in Japan cleaning the floors of rental houses and sharing a room with seven other people. These examples share the novelty of a new place and the fill of a community. Yet, when I examine the contents of the drawers more closely, other things appear: The first week I moved back home during the pandemic, watching Netflix shows with my brother and a box of hard kombucha on the couch, sleepovers with my friends before we thought about sleep as something that we needed. The common thread between all of these memories is the nature of memory itself: the fact that they exist in the past, and the inability I possess to go back and live them.

Do we always think that we were happier when we were younger? I have been asking myself this a lot, most likely because the book I am writing follows a narrative plot that mirrors my life seven years back. The book is about being young and knowing nothing, two things that I still identify with today. However, when I write about the past, I feel a sense of longing, even if I remain aware that Back Then was anything but perfect. It was riddled with depression and anxiety, adorned with joy and hope. All I see when I look back, though, is wonder.

Positive memory bias is a psychological gift we all wield: Our brains tend to recall positive experiences more vividly than negative ones, a "positivity effect" that helps to improve our overall well-being and is especially strong in older adults (Peterson, 2019; Leboe & Ansons, 2006). Knowing this, however, does not normalize the tint of the past. When I look back on the key moments of my life that I identify as the “peaks,” I feel a strong desire to find my way back to the top. Which is a peculiar thing to say, considering that statement assumes that my life right now sits at a different altitude.

The fact is, it does not. When I study Right Now, a similar shine emerges around the details, which is why I suspect that memory itself is disorienting. When we consider who we are and what we lived before, we often forget who we are and what we are living right now. Perhaps the entire trick of the past is that it reflects the things we fail to see in the present: the ephemeral nature of life itself. If it is true that we were always happier Back Then, then aren’t we always the happiest right now, since we are the youngest we’ll ever be?

There are tools we have to help us recognize the joys we are living now, time-tested and universal: therapy (a practice that equips us with time every week to stop, pause, and reflect), meditation (a habit that helps us notice the nature of our minds and strengthens our ability to coexist with them, de-emphasizing their illusions and taming their spirals), and age (a process by which, I believe—and hope—that we get better at living as we become more accustomed to what living entails). Perhaps the most universal tool encompasses all three: communication (in therapy we talk to a professional, in meditation we listen to our minds, with age we comprehend the knowledge we’ve accumulated over years).

The art of talking saves lives. When we communicate with other people, we feel seen. We find humor in the context of the problems that weigh us down and remember that those problems—and all of their associated feelings—are normal, and that we are, in fact, neither stupid nor crazy. When I boil down my depressive moments, in which I doubt Right Now and wonder whether or not I am doing life right, they all tend to follow the same logic: I lose sight of what Right Now actually is, comparing it to some other place, person, or reality, deficient of communication with myself and the people around me.

It seems simple enough: Listen to yourself, befriend and help the narratives that run around your mind, call your friends, talk to your family, spill the thoughts that are true to yourself to the people around you. However, society is not exactly set up to make these things simple. We live in a world in which we work a lot, reside in fractured space (one, two, three, or four people inside closed walls), and are taught to treat community as something to be scheduled and built, as opposed to the very fabric of our lives.

That is why I think it is important to use the tools we have, including the ones that are less obvious in their utility as vehicles for well-being. The core compass of every form of art is communication: we write to attempt to understand ourselves and the world with a bit more clarity. We paint to express something we cannot in words. We create—music, poetry, video—to draw out the beauty and joy that inspires us to keep living. If memory is a trick mirror, art is a true one.

When I create anything, the demons in my conscience don a friendlier appearance. Things that bother me melt into things I am grateful for. I see life in a more accurate lens: something that we have, something that we get to do, something that is not guaranteed. There is a meditation I keep listening to every other morning that speaks about the fleeting nature of life. It goes like this: we lose sight of wonder when we lose sight of our mortality. Everyone thinks they are immortal, not in the sense that they will live forever, but meaning that they are not aware of their own mortality. We fail to see waking up as a miracle, when millions of people do not wake up the next day. The fact that we woke up, and the people we love woke up, is a reason to shout for joy.

It is a simple view that lacks context, considering most people cannot operate as if every day were their last. Although, why can’t we? I think the point of the meditation is not to inspire us to leave our lives behind and satisfy compulsive desires, but to recognize that much of what we do, and much of what we suffer around, is optional. If we remembered that we were mortal every day, all we would do is what is necessary for us and the people we love. We would not pick small fights with ourselves or those around us, nor pressure each other to mold into better, improved, more optimized figures (of wealth, of productivity, of achievement). We would simply love one another, as thoroughly and thoughtfully as we could.

One of my favorite forms of creation is videography. I love video as a form of media because it moves. Pixels move on frames that move us. I am lucky enough to have documented several periods of my life (when I had the time to make videos) and silly enough to have stopped (when I no longer had the time to make videos). Being able to encapsulate time in a series of moving images reminds me of our mortality.

Creating little videos out of nothing (see: daily life, random thoughts, pointless monologues) reminds me that nothing is nothing. Everything is something. And this something that I am living right now—building a home with Mijael, spending time in Mexico City with friends I have begun to consider family, and cultivating a creative life—is everything I have ever wanted. It is everything I want right now.

I used to be obsessed with creating pretty things. However, as I start to create videos again, I am choosing to publish things that are less pretty and more honest. Things that I record with my phone, edit in a manic fever, and publish without worrying about the politics of aesthetics. The most recent video I created summarized a Saturday in Mexico City, in which Mijael and I celebrated Pride.

`The Meaning of Pride`

Prior to celebrating Pride, I wanted to process what I felt about the celebration. What I felt included a lot of pain and confusion around how liberal America paints a pretty picture around queer lives during the month of June, when the existence of those queer lives are still being challenged (or erased) around the country.

Joy is crucial to resistance, to change, so we should party, lift our glasses and light up the warehouse. But I hope that we all remember Pride is not the parade or the rainbow flag or the day party or the after, it is the ongoing will and hope that guides us towards more honest, authentic, and uncensored versions of ourselves. So many people, today, still struggle with their sexual and gender identities; so many people, today, are persecuted, ridiculed, and murdered—frightened into building fortresses around who it is they are and what it is they want; so many people, today, are still mourning the years they lost in the decades prior, loves never met and mistakes never made; so many people, today, grieve the memories of their friends and miss the families who failed them; so many people, today, recall a time in which the majority wanted us dead, screaming and chanting and laughing with faces that are not dissimilar from many of the ones that now wave that flag smeared with color, chromatic like the labels glued to bottles of wine and cans of beer littered across the city.

It is a miracle, and a right, that we are here. It is a work in progress. It is an unequal playing field, in which those who are white and cis forget what it was like to be targeted yet still identify as the target. I do not really know what i feel about pride aside from that I am proud of my friends, of the communities who are still fighting, for all of the beautiful voices of color and gender that remind me what it means to be queer: to evolve, to never give up, and to refuse to become silent.

I love every single one of the queer souls I’ve met in this life; you have given me hope, love, and belief—above everything, I am proud of you.

`More Questions from a Neurodivergent Brain`

I have a confession to make: I did not want to write this week’s newsletter. I have a slight headache that feels directly tied to how much time I’ve spent looking at a screen over the past few days (a lot!), Mijael got home two hours ago but I haven’t paused to hug him or listen to how his day went (bad!), and I am starting to sweat because I’ve been sitting in the same spot on the same couch for the past four hours (gross!).

Work has been crazy as of late, which means that I am creating more content and spending more time on the computer than usual. For those of you who do not know what I do for work: I create content, marketing campaigns, and brand identities for companies (see: I write a lot and spend most of my hours on the computer). All of this means that sitting down to write even more is, at times, draining.

However, I do it because I love it, because there is something special about consistency: Every time I sit down to write—even if I feel that I do not want to or that I lack a proper idea to produce something meaningful—words fall out of my fingers. And regardless of what they are, they soothe my brain. The feeling is similar to therapy (though, of course, not a replacement): Back when I had a therapist in New York, I often felt, prior to our appointments, averse to the experience of therapy itself, as if I did not have anything to talk about (or with writing: anything to say). However, every appointment proved otherwise. Every time I left feeling lighter.

Right now, the words that come to me are a bit of a mess, and perhaps the best way to organize them are through questions. Many questions have been circling my conscience like a jingle on the radio you’ve heard a million times, something you can recite from memory even if the content itself triggers no personal meaning. Maybe these questions will evolve into individual newsletters of their own. Or maybe I am just sharing them in case you wonder about them, too:

Should I move closer to my family? Should I move into a commune?
Isn’t everything better when we admire it from afar (see: a crush, a city, being this thing or that thing)?
How much money is enough money? Isn’t there some point that monetary ownership becomes immoral—and isn’t it probably sooner than we think (not just the 1%)?
If I eat a salad every day and a bowl of ice cream every night, does one cancel the other out?
Is anyone on Instagram real?
Is living online or offline better—and for who? ☷