11/02/2025
The memory loss from deep depression and trauma is not talked about enough. It’s not just forgetting small things — it’s losing entire pieces of your own life. Whole days, months, even years blur together into one long, hazy stretch of survival. You try to look back, to remember how you got here, but there are blank spaces where moments should be. It’s like flipping through a book only to realize entire chapters are missing, and all that’s left are fragments that don’t quite fit together.
People talk about sadness, anxiety, and pain — but rarely about the way trauma steals your memories. Your brain, in its attempt to protect you, starts shutting down parts of itself just to keep you functioning. It doesn’t care about memories or milestones; it only cares about getting you through the next moment. So while everyone else was living, laughing, and making memories, you were just trying to breathe, to exist, to not break.
And when you finally start to heal, you notice the gaps — the forgotten conversations, the birthdays you can’t recall, the entire seasons of your life that feel like they happened to someone else. You scroll through old photos and feel nothing but confusion, because you can see yourself there, smiling, but you don’t *remember* being there. You can’t feel what that version of you felt. It’s eerie, almost haunting, to realize that you’ve lived through moments your mind chose to erase for your own protection.
It’s not laziness, it’s not carelessness — it’s survival. When your brain is consumed with pain, it can’t process experiences normally. The constant fight-or-flight state rewires you, and instead of storing memories, your mind focuses on staying alive. You lose time, not because you didn’t care, but because your body and brain were in survival mode.
And that’s something few people understand: healing from trauma isn’t just about easing the pain — it’s also about mourning the pieces of your life you’ll never get back. The days you were alive but not really living. The memories that should’ve been yours but were stolen by the weight of what you endured. It’s heartbreaking, but also proof of your strength — you survived what your mind couldn’t even bear to remember.
