Memory, Interrupted

You ever look back on the worst months of your life and realize they’re basically… missing? Like your brain just rage-quit mid-season and refused to film the episodes? That’s the thing about deep depression and trauma—they can turn your memory into a drunk intern who lost the filing cabinet, shredded half the files, and then went on vacation. Whole days vanish, conversations get replaced with static, and time turns into one long, blurry ‘previously on’ montage.

Today, we’re talking about why your brain sometimes acts like a shady narrator in your own life story—and why that missing footage isn’t you being broken, it’s your mind trying to keep you alive. Let's get into it.

Deep depression and trauma can scramble your memory in a way that feels like your brain’s hard drive just… forgot to save. And it’s not just the big, cinematic moments that disappear—it’s the everyday stuff, too. The text you swear you replied to but apparently never sent. The lunch you apparently ate but have zero recollection of choosing, preparing, or chewing. The week that somehow skipped from Monday to Friday without asking for your permission, leaving you wondering if you slept through a time warp.

This isn’t you being lazy, careless, or “bad with details.” It’s your brain hitting survival mode, rerouting all its available energy toward keeping you breathing, upright, and minimally functional. The problem is, survival mode isn’t optimized for recordkeeping—it’s optimized for getting you through the day. Which means things like neatly filing your memories get shoved to the bottom of the priority list, right under “find snacks” and “don’t completely lose it in public.”

On this bonus episode, we’re pulling back the curtain on what’s actually happening in your brain when depression and trauma pull the plug on your memory. We’ll dig into the science—the way stress hormones, overactive alarm systems, and foggy motivation can team up to short-circuit your ability to remember. We’ll talk about the real-life ways this can show up—everything from the frustratingly small gaps to the unnerving, “Wait… was I even there?” blackouts. And most importantly, we’ll talk about what you can do about it—not to magically restore every lost moment, but to work with your brain instead of beating yourself up for something it’s doing to protect you.

Because if you’ve ever felt like someone tore whole chapters out of your life story, you’re not imagining it. And you’re definitely not alone, because I've been there too, and I'm happy to.. Well maybe not exactly happy to, but I'm going to share how this has affected my life. Your brain might have hit pause on the scrapbook, but there’s still a way to make sense of what’s left—and even start filling in the pages again.

When you’re in the thick of deep depression or fresh off a trauma, your brain’s stress systems crank up like a smoke alarm with a dying battery—loud, relentless, and impossible to ignore. One of the first casualties? Your memory.

So let's get into The Brain Cast of Characters in Your Memory Drama

• The Hippocampus — The Frazzled Archivist

  
  

  Normally, this little structure in your temporal lobe is your personal librarian—quietly filing away new experiences into long-term storage. But under chronic depression or trauma, it gets cortisol-burnout, shrinks in size, and starts misplacing everything. Imagine a librarian who’s been awake for 72 hours, filing books in random sections, and muttering, “I’ll fix it later” (spoiler: it never gets fixed).

• The Amygdala — The Overdramatic Alarm Bell

  
  

  This is your brain’s threat detector. In a calm state, it’s like a guard dog who only barks when there’s a reason. During trauma or depression, it’s more like a chihuahua on triple espresso—constantly sounding the alarm. That flood of emotion yanks your focus to danger signals instead of normal details, which means fewer memories even make it to the archivist.

• The Prefrontal Cortex — The Overworked Project Manager

  
  

  This part of your brain handles working memory, decision-making, and keeping you on task. But when stress is high, it goes into energy-conservation mode, cutting non-essential functions. It’s the project manager who walks out of the meeting halfway through and says, “Figure it out yourselves.” Without it, your short-term memory suffers and your attention gets spotty.

When these three start miscommunicating—or stop talking altogether—you get the perfect storm: fewer memories stored, more fragmented recall, and a whole lot of “Wait… did that actually happen, or did I dream it?”

That’s because your hippocampus—the part of your brain responsible for encoding and organizing memories—takes a beating under chronic stress. Research shows that prolonged exposure to stress hormones, especially cortisol, can actually shrink the hippocampus and slow down the growth of new neurons. Translation: your brain’s “save file” button starts moving in slow motion, like a filing cabinet where the drawers are jammed, mislabeled, and maybe also full of dead spiders.

Meanwhile, your amygdala—the brain’s emotional alarm bell—gets louder and more reactive, hijacking attention and shoving your focus toward threats (real or imagined) instead of everyday details you might want to remember later. Chronic stress keeps flooding your system with cortisol, which disrupts the consolidation of memories. It’s like trying to write in a journal while the room’s shaking from an earthquake—you’re too busy bracing yourself to make anything legible.

On top of that, the prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain that handles working memory and executive function—goes partially offline when stress is high, leaving you with less capacity to focus and store new information. Depression fog, trauma hypervigilance—both hijack your mental bandwidth so thoroughly that there’s barely any room left to encode memories in the first place.

And when trauma is involved, the memories you do manage to store often bypass the usual “logical storyline” route and get filed in more primitive, sensory-driven systems. That’s why you might be left with random flashes of smell, sound, or body sensation without the full context. It’s less “orderly scrapbook” and more “shoebox of loose Polaroids someone spilled coffee on”—and your brain’s just hoping you never have to organize them.

Living with depression- or trauma-induced memory loss is like trying to watch your own life with half the footage missing and the rest recorded on a shaky camcorder someone borrowed from the 90s. The narration is spotty at best—like it’s being done by someone who only caught every third sentence, got distracted halfway through, and occasionally wandered out of the room.

What you’re left with is what I like to call “Swiss cheese recall,” except the holes are way bigger than the solid bits. The stuff that does make it through tends to be weirdly specific and often useless—like the way fluorescent lights hummed and flickered in a waiting room, the bitter smell of burnt coffee lingering in a break room, or the exact scratchy feel of your skin sticking to a vinyl chair on a hot day. But entire conversations? Errands you definitely ran? Even whole weeks of your life? Wiped clean, as though your brain took one look and decided, “Nope, not worth the shelf space.”

It’s disorienting in the most everyday ways. You can find yourself arguing with your own mind—“I know I replied to that text” or “Didn’t I already tell that story?”—only to realize the memory isn’t just fuzzy, it’s completely gone. And the strangest part is how casual the brain is about it, like a bored editor cutting scenes from a film without caring whether the plot still makes sense. You get snippets, fragments, sensory snapshots—but the through-line, the storyline that helps you feel like you were there for your own life, is missing in action.

Time itself starts to lose shape. Days don’t line up neatly, they smear together like wet ink on a page. Weeks stretch endlessly, only to collapse suddenly, leaving you blinking at the calendar and wondering how the hell it’s already next month. It can feel like you’ve been trapped on the world’s slowest carousel—everything dragging on in circles—or, other times, like someone’s been jabbing the fast-forward button without telling you, skipping whole chunks of your life while you weren’t looking.

And then there are the “autopilot gaps,” which are somehow both convenient and terrifying. Those moments when you come back online mid-task and realize your body has been going through the motions without you. You’ve driven halfway across town with no memory of the streets in between. You’ve polished off an entire meal and only vaguely remember the first bite. You’ve nodded through a conversation, even laughed in the right places, but later couldn’t repeat a single word that was said. It’s like your body clocked in, did the shift, and clocked out again, while your brain snuck out the back door for a smoke break in the alley.

The eerie part is how normal it can feel in the moment. You only realize you’ve been running on empty after the fact—like waking up in the passenger seat and realizing you’ve been the one driving the whole time. That’s the unsettling reality of depression and trauma on memory: your life continues, but your awareness only shows up for fragments, leaving you piecing things together after the fact like a detective at your own crime scene.

Trauma takes this a step further by creating what I call “spotlight memories.” These aren’t just vivid—they’re seared into your brain like a tattoo you never agreed to. Every sight, every sound, every sensation is preserved in such excruciating detail that just brushing against it can make you flinch. You can smell the cologne someone was wearing, hear the exact tone of their voice, or feel the texture of the carpet under your hands. It’s like your brain hit record during the worst possible moment and then never, ever stopped replaying it.

The catch is that while those traumatic snapshots are crystal clear, the surrounding hours, days, or even whole years fade into static. Everything beyond the spotlight vanishes into total darkness. Your personal timeline starts to look less like a continuous film and more like a patchwork of intense flashbulb images with long stretches of nothing in between. It’s as if your brain decided, “We’ll keep the fire alarm going off forever, but toss the rest of the house blueprints in the shredder.”

And even when you can retrieve a memory, it’s rarely instant or convenient. The recall process feels like trying to load a webpage on ancient dial-up—complete with the screeching tones and endless buffering. Your brain cheerfully reassures you, “We’re working on it… maybe… eventually.” Sometimes, after you’ve stopped thinking about it, the memory will finally pop up hours later—usually while you’re in the shower or trying to fall asleep. Other times, the page just times out entirely, leaving you staring at the blank screen of your own mind where a piece of your life should be.

That unpredictability can be maddening. You can remember what song was playing during a traumatic event twenty years ago, but not what you had for breakfast yesterday. You can recall the way the air felt on your skin during a specific moment of danger, but not whether you locked the door this morning. Trauma memories don’t just mess with recall—they distort the balance, giving disproportionate weight to pain while erasing the mundane details that make life feel cohesive and real.

Depression and trauma both mess with your memory, but they do it in two very different—but equally frustrating—flavors of chaos.

Depression is the generalized fog variety, where everything gets dulled down to beige. It’s the mental equivalent of trying to take notes in a lecture you didn’t even want to attend, delivered by a professor who sounds like they’re narrating white noise, at 8 a.m., in a freezing classroom with flickering fluorescent lights. Your motivation is already in the gutter, your attention span has been replaced by static, and your interest level is somewhere below “watching paint dry on a rainy day.” With all of that dialed down, your brain isn’t even bothering to hit the “record” button most of the time—it’s like someone muted the camera and wandered off. Life just slides by without much intention to save it.

This is why so many people with depression look back on certain months—or even years—and realize there’s very little stored there. The memory gaps don’t always feel dramatic; it’s more like looking back through a photo album only to realize half the pages are blank. Instead of colorful moments and details, you just get a vague gray haze, the sense of “I know I existed, but I can’t tell you what I was doing.”

The upside is that this fog is often reversible. When the depression starts to lift, so does the haze. It’s like wiping down a fogged-up bathroom mirror after a hot shower—suddenly, the outlines of your life start to sharpen, details come back into focus, and you can actually recognize yourself again. Memories may not all return, but new ones start sticking in a way they couldn’t when your brain was in survival mode.

Trauma, though… trauma is sneakier. It doesn’t just blur everything out into one uniform haze—it plays favorites. Some moments get burned into your brain in painfully sharp high-definition, every sensory detail so vivid it might as well be happening right now. You can smell the air, feel the texture of the floor, hear the exact tone of someone’s voice. Those memories don’t fade—they hang around like neon signs you never asked for, flashing “remember me” at the worst possible times.

But then there’s the flip side: entire chunks of time that are completely blacked out or scrambled. It’s like watching an old TV with rabbit ears, catching a flicker of the picture before it dissolves into static. You might get flashes—half a conversation, a smell, a sound—but not enough to make a coherent story. That’s your brain stepping in with its “protection detail,” filtering out the pieces it thinks will overwhelm you and locking them away until you’re “ready.” Of course, your brain is maddeningly vague about when that magical “ready” date is. Spoiler: it never sends you a calendar invite.

The problem with this system is that while it might keep you afloat in the short term, those missing or jumbled chunks make it so much harder to process what actually happened. You’re essentially working with an incomplete puzzle—some pieces hyper-detailed, others missing entirely, and a few from a totally different box that don’t seem to fit anywhere. You know the picture is supposed to make sense, but your brain has redacted whole sections with a fat black Sharpie.

So when people say trauma makes you “forget,” it’s not apathy or carelessness. It’s not, “I forgot because I didn’t care.” It’s more like, “I forgot because my brain decided this file is sealed in the evidence locker until further notice… and we’re not opening it without a hazmat suit, a fire extinguisher, and probably a therapist with snacks.”

But long-term trauma—like years of abuse, chronic neglect, or growing up in a high-stress, unsafe environment—works differently still. It’s not just one jarring event that your brain scrambles around; it’s living in a constant state of “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” with no real off-switch. Over time, your nervous system stops treating this as an emergency and starts treating it as normal. It’s like your internal smoke alarm decides that blaring 24/7 is just part of the décor.

This constant stress state reshapes your brain. The hippocampus—the part responsible for memory storage—stays under-functioning, which means fewer experiences get properly recorded and organized in the first place. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex—the bit that helps you focus, plan, and make decisions—gets worn down too, so even the memories that are stored can feel foggy, fragmented, or stripped of context. Instead of a few missing files, you end up with entire archives that are spotty, distorted, or mislabeled in ways that don’t make sense later.

The result? You might look back on whole periods of your life and find them emotionally thin, like watching events through frosted glass. The details are either fuzzy or absent, and the memories you do have are often tangled up with the survival responses you were locked in at the time—fear, hypervigilance, people-pleasing, or emotional numbing. It becomes nearly impossible to separate what actually happened from the stress chemicals and coping strategies that framed it.

This isn’t just selective forgetting or temporary fog—it’s cumulative. Long-term trauma wires your brain to prioritize survival over recordkeeping for years at a time, and that shapes the way memories are formed, stored, and recalled. Even when you finally feel safer, your memory can still feel untrustworthy because it was built under constant cortisol pressure. It’s not just missing chunks of story—it’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are bent, cut wrong, or from a totally different box, and the picture on the cover doesn’t match what you actually lived.

And here’s the kicker: people with long-term trauma often doubt their own experiences because of this. When your recollections feel hazy, muted, or disorganized, it’s easy to gaslight yourself into wondering if it “really happened” or if you’re just making it up. But the truth is, those distortions are the trauma. They’re not evidence against you—they’re evidence of what you survived.

This isn’t you being flaky, careless, or the human version of a lost phone charger—it’s your brain running a full-scale survival protocol. When you’re in the thick of deep depression or navigating trauma, your mind has one priority: keep you alive and functioning just enough to make it through the day. It’s not worried about whether you’ll remember what you had for lunch on Tuesday, or if you’ll be able to recall the details of a conversation a week from now. It’s focused on the basics: breathe, move, don’t collapse.

The thing is, memory takes energy. Encoding, storing, and later retrieving an event isn’t passive—it’s a resource-heavy process involving your hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and a finely tuned balance of neurotransmitters. And when you’re depressed or traumatized, your brain simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to spare. It’s like being trapped in low-power mode—your phone will still send texts, maybe check an email or two, but forget about running video, GPS, and ten apps at once. In survival mode, the brain shuts down “non-essentials” like making a polished highlight reel of your life and diverts that energy to things that keep you standing upright.

That’s why you can remember the bare minimum—the essentials for survival—but everything else gets hazy or goes missing. It’s not laziness, and it’s definitely not a personal failing. It’s your nervous system rationing resources the same way you’d ration food and water in an emergency: spend them only where they matter most in the moment.

So no, you’re not broken. You’re not forgetful in the casual, scatterbrained way people mean when they say it. You’re a person whose brain has been forced to triage what matters, and right now, survival beats scrapbooking every single time.

Think of it like being on a sinking ship—you’re not pausing to jot down the precise Pantone shade of the water for your scrapbook. You’re scanning for the life vest, avoiding falling debris, and praying you don’t swallow too much seawater. Recording events accurately gets bumped to the bottom of the priority list because every available ounce of mental bandwidth is being used to handle the immediate emotional or physical overload.

Biologically, when you’re under the weight of deep depression or trauma stress, your brain starts reallocating its resources like a panicked manager in a crisis—grabbing coffee, yelling at interns, and shoving paperwork off the desk just to keep the lights on. The hippocampus—the part of your brain responsible for taking daily experiences and converting them into neatly filed long-term memories—gets shoved to the sidelines. Memory-making isn’t “urgent,” so it’s put on the back burner.

Instead, the brain throws everything it has into survival systems. The amygdala, your threat detection center, climbs into the driver’s seat, revving like an overcaffeinated security guard who sees danger in every shadow. Meanwhile, the hypothalamus flips on the HPA axis (that’s short for hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal), the stress-response chain that tells your body, “Uh oh, crisis incoming.” This unleashes a flood of cortisol and adrenaline into your system—chemicals that are great for escaping predators but absolute trash for calmly cataloging the details of your Tuesday afternoon.

And once that cascade kicks in, your whole physiology shifts. Heart rate up, digestion down, muscles primed, attention narrowed. Your body is basically screaming, “Run, fight, hide, or please someone until the danger passes!”—not, “Let’s make sure we record this day in high-def for future reminiscing.” In other words: survival takes the front seat, and memory gets tossed into the trunk.

In this mode, your brain isn’t prioritizing memory-making—it’s prioritizing keeping you alive. Think of it like your internal power grid during a blackout: the system shuts down everything non-essential so it can keep the emergency lights on. It’s not that your brain can’t record memories; it’s that it’s making an active trade-off: survival now, details later. Encoding and organizing experiences takes energy, and when you’re in crisis, that energy gets rerouted toward immediate safety.

That’s why your body doesn’t politely sit down to journal what’s happening—it flips into one of the big four survival responses. Instead of filing the moment away neatly in the hippocampus, your brain fires up the amygdala and hypothalamus to manage the threat. Blood pressure spikes, hormones flood your system, muscles tighten, awareness narrows. Everything you’ve got is pointed toward not dying, not toward building a tidy scrapbook you can flip through later.

This is where the “Four F’s” come in: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Each one is a different strategy your nervous system can deploy under stress, and each comes with its own quirks when it comes to memory. Some leave you with sharp, painful fragments; others leave you with blank spaces where whole scenes should be.

Fight – When your body flips into fight mode, it’s like your entire system gets an adrenaline IV. Your heart rate spikes, blood pressure rises, and your muscles tense as if you’re about to sprint into the Hunger Games. The amygdala—the brain’s alarm bell—decides, “Okay, gloves off, we’re throwing down,” and funnels all your resources toward confrontation. Your focus narrows onto the perceived threat with laser precision, and everything else—conversation, surroundings, even basic memory encoding—drops out of awareness.

It’s not about preserving the details for later. You’re not thinking, “Wow, I’ll really want to remember the color of the wallpaper during this crisis.” You’re thinking, “How do I not get destroyed right now?” Your hippocampus, which normally would be filing away what’s happening, gets shoved into the backseat while your survival systems take the wheel. Later, you may remember the pounding in your chest or the exact words that triggered you, but the rest of the scene often dissolves into static.

Flight – When your system flips into flight, your body basically screams, “Nope, we’re outta here.” Blood flow gets rerouted to your legs and arms, priming you to run like you’re auditioning for the Olympics. Adrenaline surges through your system, giving you bursts of speed and energy that aren’t meant for marathon training—they’re meant for getting you away from whatever your brain has labeled as a threat.

Tunnel vision kicks in hard. Your awareness shrinks down to escape routes, exits, the sound of footsteps behind you. In this state, anything not tied directly to survival becomes irrelevant. You’re not cataloging faces, dates, or conversations; you’re locked on, calculating, “Where’s the nearest way out?” Meanwhile, your hippocampus—the part of your brain that should be making sense of the moment—is basically on lunch break, muttering, “Yeah, I’ll catch up later.”

The result? You might clearly remember the door you bolted through or the pounding of your feet on the pavement, but the rest of the scene often vanishes into fog. Survival details stick; context doesn’t.

Freeze – Freeze is your nervous system slamming the brakes. Heart rate drops, muscles lock up, and it feels like someone hit the “pause” button on your body without asking. Your brain narrows in on the danger but doesn’t push you toward action; it’s like your system is thinking, “If I stay really still, maybe this will pass.” This can feel like numbness, dissociation, or being trapped in your own skin.

From a memory standpoint, freeze is a nightmare. Because you’re in shutdown mode, your hippocampus barely logs anything. What does slip through often comes as disconnected fragments—maybe a smell, a sound, or the look on someone’s face—without the full storyline around it. Later, it can feel like those memories don’t belong to you, like you watched them happen from outside your body. Freeze keeps you safe in the moment by conserving energy and avoiding detection, but it often leaves you with the patchiest, most disjointed recall of all the responses.

Fawn – Fawn is survival by appeasement. Instead of fighting, running, or shutting down, your system goes, “Maybe if I keep them happy, I’ll stay safe.” Your body floods with stress hormones, but instead of fueling confrontation or escape, the energy gets channeled into people-pleasing. You might find yourself agreeing, smoothing things over, saying what you think the other person wants to hear—sometimes without even realizing you’re doing it.

In fawn mode, your focus is on the threat’s mood, tone, or reaction, not on your own thoughts or needs. Memory gets warped because your hippocampus is too busy monitoring someone else’s signals to record what’s happening inside you. Later, you may vividly remember their expression, their words, or the way you felt braced to keep them calm—but your own perspective in the moment? Gone. It’s like your brain outsourced awareness of yourself in order to survive the situation.

When fight, flight, freeze, or fawn stops being a temporary reaction and becomes your baseline, your nervous system rewires itself to treat “high alert” as the default setting. Instead of dipping in and out of survival mode like it’s supposed to, you end up living there full-time, like your body built a permanent campsite in the middle of a battlefield.

This is especially common in situations of long-term abuse, chronic neglect, or years of growing up in an unpredictable, unsafe environment. When the rules keep changing, when danger feels random, or when safety never fully arrives, your brain adapts by assuming threat is always just around the corner. The smoke alarm never gets turned off—it just becomes background noise.

Over time, this constant activation reshapes how your body and mind function. Your stress hormones hover at a simmer instead of spiking only in emergencies. Your amygdala—the brain’s panic button—gets hyper-sensitive, firing off alarms even at small triggers. Meanwhile, your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex struggle to keep up, meaning memory storage, decision-making, and clear focus all take a hit. You’re not just bracing for the occasional danger—you’re living like danger is inevitable.

The result? Exhaustion, patchy memory, and a life that feels like it’s being lived in fragments instead of flow. You adapt, you survive, but you don’t get the downtime needed to actually process your experiences. Survival mode becomes the water you swim in, and eventually, you forget what it feels like to come up for air.

The Hippocampus — This little seahorse-shaped structure is basically your brain’s archivist, in charge of turning daily experiences into organized long-term memories. But under chronic stress, it gets hammered with cortisol over and over again, like someone constantly yelling in its ear while it’s trying to alphabetize files. Over time, that constant exposure literally shrinks its volume and slows down the birth of new neurons, which means its filing system goes from “efficient librarian” to “overwhelmed raccoon sorting papers in the dark.”

The result? Even neutral, everyday events don’t get recorded cleanly. A random Tuesday might leave you with only a few scattered impressions—what you ate, maybe a sound you heard—but the overall storyline is missing. Instead of a continuous record, you end up with gaps, smudges, and half-filled pages. That’s why whole swaths of time can feel like they never even happened. People will ask, “Remember when we did that last summer?” and your brain responds with static, because the hippocampus never logged it in the first place.

And here’s the kicker: the hippocampus is also involved in giving memories a timeline. When it’s under-functioning, not only do you forget things—you also lose the sense of when something happened. Events blur together, months collapse, and you’re left feeling like your personal history is out of order, or missing whole chapters. It’s not that your life didn’t happen; it’s that your hippocampus didn’t have the resources to write it down properly.

The Amygdala — If the hippocampus is your archivist, the amygdala is your smoke alarm. Its whole job is scanning for danger and screaming “FIRE!” whether there’s actual smoke or just burnt toast. Under chronic depression or trauma, the amygdala doesn’t calm down after the threat passes—it gets hypersensitive. It starts firing at shadows, convinced every creak of the floorboard is an intruder. That heightened vigilance pulls your attention toward threat cues at the expense of everything else.

And here’s the kicker: the amygdala is really good at emotional memory. That’s why you might vividly recall the fear you felt in a certain moment but have no memory of what day it was, who else was there, or how the scene started or ended. The alarm system encoded the feeling and tossed the context out the window. So later, you’re stuck with the raw emotional charge—panic, dread, anger—without the narrative that helps it make sense. It’s like your brain saved the soundtrack of the horror movie but forgot to record the actual plot.

The Prefrontal Cortex — Think of this as your brain’s project manager. It handles planning, focus, working memory, and keeping everyone else in line. But under prolonged stress, the prefrontal cortex gets shoved out of the meeting room by the amygdala and the HPA axis (the stress-response chain). Instead of calmly weighing options and making rational choices, the prefrontal cortex goes quiet—like a manager who just walked out mid-project and left the interns in charge.

Without the prefrontal cortex steering, your ability to regulate emotions, prioritize tasks, and encode memories all take a hit. You might find yourself scattered, unable to concentrate, or forgetting things almost immediately after they happen. Working memory—the mental Post-it notes you rely on for day-to-day functioning—fills up fast and falls off even faster. Add trauma to the mix, and the prefrontal cortex can go nearly offline, leaving you stuck in reactive mode. That’s why decisions feel impossible, focus evaporates, and your memory feels less like a filing cabinet and more like a messy desk with papers sliding onto the floor.

Put them all together, and you’ve got a system that’s operating like a very dysfunctional workplace. The hippocampus, normally your diligent archivist, is too burned-out to file things properly. Half the folders are missing, and the ones it does manage to shelve are crooked, mislabeled, or shoved in the wrong drawer. Meanwhile, the amygdala has taken over the office intercom, shrieking about every possible threat like an overzealous security guard who thinks a squeaky chair is a sign of imminent danger. And the prefrontal cortex? The project manager who’s supposed to keep everything running smoothly? It has basically walked out of the meeting and left the interns in charge, leaving decision-making and organization to fend for themselves.

The end result is a brain that’s fantastic at survival in the moment—reacting quickly, keeping you on guard, making sure you don’t get destroyed—but terrible at preserving your lived experience in a way that feels coherent or trustworthy. Instead of a neat timeline of your life, you get scraps, fragments, and emotional snapshots, stitched together into something that often feels incomplete, distorted, or unreliable.

Over time, this rewiring doesn’t just mess with memory—it reshapes your entire experience of reality. The past can feel hazy, patchy, or disjointed, not because those moments weren’t important, but because your brain never had the bandwidth, downtime, or sense of safety to record them in the first place. It’s like your mind kept hitting “autosave” in the middle of chaos, leaving you with fragments instead of full chapters.

Think of it like trying to keep a diary while standing in a war zone. Sure, you might jot down a few words here and there—who was there, what you felt in the moment, a sharp sensory detail—but the entries are out of order, written with shaky handwriting, smudged with adrenaline, and often missing entire sections. Later, when you flip back through the pages, the diary doesn’t read like a story; it reads like scattered notes from someone trying to survive.

That’s the reality of long-term stress: your brain learns to prioritize immediacy over continuity. You remember the door slamming, the tone of someone’s voice, the pit in your stomach—because those details might mean survival—but birthdays, milestones, or even whole seasons of your life blur into fog. Over time, this can warp not only how you remember the past but how you experience the present. If your nervous system has been wired to assume danger at all times, you’re not really living in your life—you’re scanning, bracing, and logging fragments, while the bigger picture slips away.

And when you finally do look back, it can feel less like remembering your own history and more like piecing together someone else’s puzzle with missing and mismatched pieces. The continuity that makes a life story feel whole gets fractured, leaving you with an uneven mix of hyper-detailed moments and long stretches of blank space.

The frustrating part? “Later” doesn’t always come. Your brain makes this bargain with itself—survival first, memories later—but once the crisis has passed, those missing pieces don’t magically reappear like bonus footage on a DVD. You might eventually feel safer, more stable, and more present, but the moments that went unrecorded under survival mode are often gone for good. Or, if they do exist somewhere, they’re stored in such a fragmented, scrambled way that trying to retrieve them feels like rummaging through a junk drawer blindfolded—every so often you find something sharp, and it hurts.

And those fragments aren’t neutral. Some come with a full sensory payload—the smell, the sound, the heart-racing panic of the moment—without the context that makes them make sense. So instead of playing back like a movie you can watch from start to finish, your memory feels more like a handful of disordered screenshots. A slammed door here. A flash of someone’s face there. And every once in a while, one of those screenshots comes with an emotional sucker punch that leaves you winded.

That’s why this isn’t “just forgetfulness.” Forgetfulness is misplacing your keys or blanking on someone’s name at a party. This is your brain running a triage system—choosing, in real time, to sacrifice accuracy and continuity in favor of sheer survival. It’s your nervous system leaning back in its chair, exhaling through gritted teeth, and saying, “We’ll scrapbook later… assuming there even is a later. Right now, we’re busy not dying.”

The kicker is, by the time you’re finally in a place where you could process those memories, the files are already corrupted—or locked in a cabinet your brain refuses to open without sirens going off. Which means you’re left not only with missing time, but also with the unsettling sense that your own history isn’t fully yours to access. That’s not laziness, and it’s not a character flaw—it’s biology making an impossible trade.

Long-term trauma is like living in a smoke-filled room where the fire alarm never shuts off. At first, the shrieking siren and the haze of smoke are unbearable—you jump at every sound, your body is tense, your heart races. But after a while, you just… adapt. You start eating dinner to the sound of the alarm, sleeping with it blaring in your ear, and carrying on conversations while the smoke burns your eyes. It becomes background noise, not because it’s harmless, but because your body has decided that functioning in chaos is safer than shutting down completely.

The problem? While you’re busy adjusting to the noise and smoke, you stop paying attention to anything else. You’re not savoring a good meal, remembering what someone said in passing, or tucking away joyful details for later. You’re scanning constantly for flames, checking exits, making sure the door isn’t blocked. Your brain—especially the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex—gets rewired to focus only on survival cues. The hippocampus, which should be filing away your memories, slows down and misfiles entire chapters. The amygdala, your built-in alarm bell, becomes hyperactive and won’t let you relax long enough to store normal experiences. And the prefrontal cortex, the project manager of your brain, gets worn down to the point where decision-making and focus take a nosedive.

That means the “little stuff” that makes a life story coherent—the birthdays, the jokes, the random Wednesday afternoons—never even makes it into the memory bank. Instead, you’re left with a running log of danger scans, adrenaline spikes, and stress responses.

And when the smoke finally clears—if it ever does—you look back and realize whole chunks of your life are missing. Not because they weren’t important. Not because you didn’t care. But because your brain was too busy making sure you didn’t burn to the ground. What’s left often feels like a warped record: flashes of panic in vivid detail, with long stretches of static in between. The continuity that makes a story feel whole gets lost in the haze, leaving you with fragments of survival, but not the full narrative of living.

And here’s the thing—just because your brain’s been living in that smoke-filled room doesn’t mean it’s doomed to stay there forever. The fire alarm can quiet down. The smoke can clear. The nervous system is remarkably ellastic, which means it can learn new patterns when the conditions are right. But here’s the catch—it doesn’t happen by accident. Healing doesn’t show up one morning like a surprise Amazon delivery on your doorstep. It happens slowly, intentionally, when you start giving your brain the space and safety it needs to stop scanning for danger every second and start noticing the small, ordinary details of your life again.

That’s where the real work begins. And by “work,” I don’t mean forcing yourself to recall every blank space or trying to hammer missing memories into place—that’s not how this goes. Some of those chapters are gone for good, and that’s okay. The goal isn’t perfect recall of the past; the goal is to strengthen your capacity to be present now so that today’s moments don’t slip away too. It’s about creating enough calm in your system that the hippocampus can do its job again—recording, organizing, and letting you hold onto new experiences instead of constantly running on survival mode.

And there’s another piece here: sometimes, when the nervous system is supported, even old fragments can be stitched together into something that feels more coherent. No, it won’t be a flawless movie reel of your past—but with the right tools, therapy, and self-compassion, those scraps can become part of a larger story you can understand and live with.

So that’s where we’re headed next: not a magic cure, but the practical tools and habits that can help your brain record new memories more clearly and give you back a sense of continuity. Because you deserve more than survival notes scribbled in the margins—you deserve to remember the parts of your life worth holding onto.

If your brain’s decided to half-ass the whole “remembering your life” thing, the trick is to outsource some of the work to systems that don’t get brain fog. Think of it as hiring an external assistant—except this one doesn’t call in sick or accidentally delete your files. External memory supports—like journaling, voice memos, photos, sticky notes, or setting alarms for literally everything—can act as your spare hippocampus, quietly keeping track of the stuff your actual hippocampus yeeted into the void.

The point isn’t to turn your whole life into a conspiracy theorist’s crime scene corkboard, strings connecting every reminder and Post-it like you’re trying to solve your own disappearance. The point is to create a trail of breadcrumbs that future-you can follow when your memory decides to nope out. That could look like flipping back through a journal and realizing, “Oh right, that’s when that conversation happened,” or scrolling your camera roll and piecing together, “That’s the weekend I visited so-and-so.” It’s not glamorous, but it’s functional.

And honestly? Giving your brain this kind of backup system takes the pressure off. Instead of panicking about why you can’t recall what you did yesterday or beating yourself up for forgetting, you can lean on the receipts. It’s less about perfect recall and more about building scaffolding that helps you reconstruct your days when your own internal filing system has gone on strike. Future-you will be grateful for the trail of notes, reminders, and little digital breadcrumbs—even if present-you rolls your eyes at how many alarms you had to set to survive.

Therapy can be a real game-changer here, especially approaches like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), trauma-focused CBT, or somatic work. What these methods do is essentially help you pull scattered memory fragments out of the mental junk drawer—the one full of loose batteries, half-broken pens, and receipts from 2014—and actually sort them into something resembling a coherent timeline.

With trauma, the memories usually are there, but they’re not filed in the “normal” places. Instead of being stored neatly as narrative memories—“this happened, then that happened”—they often end up lodged in sensory fragments or body sensations. That’s why you might not be able to recall the story of an event, but you can feel the panic in your chest when you hear a certain tone of voice, or smell something that suddenly makes you want to bolt. The memory isn’t gone—it’s just been filed under “random sensory chaos” instead of “Tuesday, age 12.”

Therapeutic approaches like EMDR work by helping your brain reprocess those stuck memories so they can move from raw, sensory-heavy fragments into integrated narrative memories. It doesn’t erase what happened, but it takes the charge down a few notches—turning the mental landmines into something you can walk past without blowing up. Trauma-focused CBT helps by reframing the thoughts and beliefs that got tangled up with those memories, reducing the grip they have on your day-to-day life. Somatic therapies, on the other hand, go straight to the body, working with the way trauma often gets “stored” as muscle tension, posture, or nervous system patterns.

When you start to integrate those memories—pulling them out of the sensory junk drawer and into a cohesive story—the mental static they create begins to quiet down. You stop being hijacked by flashbacks or body responses you can’t explain, and instead gain context: this happened, this is how it affected me, and this is how I carry it now. It doesn’t make the memories pretty, but it makes them livable—and that shift can be life-changing.

On a day-to-day level, think of your brain like a muscle—it needs steady, low-impact exercise to stay functional. When you’ve been through depression or trauma, the instinct is often to either push too hard (and burn out) or give up altogether (“why bother, I’ll just forget it anyway”). But memory, like muscle, responds best to consistent, gentle training.

That’s where small cognitive workouts come in. Things like crosswords, word searches, Sudoku, or memory games aren’t just passing time—they’re keeping your neural pathways limber. Reading a book and challenging yourself to recall the plot later, telling a story to a friend, or learning something new (a skill, a recipe, a song lyric) can act like stretching for your brain. You’re not running marathons here—you’re taking it for a brisk walk around the block to remind it what it can do.

And here’s the key: even tiny wins matter. Remembering a random fact you skimmed on your phone, recalling the name of a character in a show, or realizing you did keep track of where you left your keys—all of that rebuilds confidence. Instead of assuming your memory can’t be trusted, you slowly collect proof that it’s still in there, still working, even if it needs encouragement.

It’s less about building a supercomputer brain and more about reminding yourself that the system hasn’t shut down completely—it just needs gentle rebooting. Over time, those little stretches and workouts add up, just like physical rehab. You may not see dramatic results overnight, but consistency helps your memory get stronger, steadier, and more reliable.

And then there’s the most underrated piece: lightening your stress load. It sounds simple, but it’s the foundation everything else rests on. Take sleep, for example. Your brain literally uses those hours to consolidate memories—shuffling short-term experiences into long-term storage like a night shift librarian. When you skimp on rest, it’s basically like leaving the library doors locked and the books piled up in a heap. Nothing gets filed, nothing gets saved, and you wake up with a mental backlog that just keeps growing.

Movement is another sneaky player here. Not punishment-style exercise you hate, but movement that helps regulate your nervous system. A walk, some stretches, dancing in your kitchen—these all shift your body out of “red alert” mode and remind your brain it’s safe enough to spend energy on something other than crisis management. Think of it as shaking the snow globe so all the static settles.

And then there are emotional regulation skills—breathing, grounding, mindfulness, or even something as simple as talking yourself down from the ledge of panic. These practices give your nervous system a chance to reset. When your body isn’t braced for the next disaster, your brain can finally use its resources for things like encoding new memories instead of constantly scanning the horizon for danger.

Basically, if you want your mind to stop running on “please don’t crash” mode, you’ve got to give it the conditions to reboot. Think of it like an overworked computer: if you never close the tabs, never let it cool down, and keep demanding it run ten programs at once, of course it’s going to glitch. But give it enough support—rest, movement, calm—and suddenly the system starts working the way it was meant to. The more you support your brain from the outside, the more likely it is to show up for you on the inside.

Have you figured out a pattern to these bonus episodes yet, dear listener? Because if you haven’t, let me let you in on the secret—these are the spots where I get a little more personal, a little less polished, and tell you some of the messy stuff from my own life. Call it the behind-the-scenes footage you didn’t know you needed—because whatever your version looks like, you’re not the only one living it. None of us are.

And here’s my confession for this one: my memory is basically a block of Swiss cheese. Full of holes, unpredictable, and occasionally embarrassing when I realize I’ve lost track of entire stretches of time. I can remember the tiniest, weirdest details—like what someone was wearing or the exact smell of a hospital waiting room—but ask me what year something happened or who said what in a conversation, and sometimes it’s like watching a TV screen flicker to static.

So, if your brain ever feels like it’s missing whole chapters of your own story, you’re in good company. I’ve lived it, too. We've already dug into why memory loss shows up with depression and trauma, so now it's time to get into what it feels like in real time, and how I’ve learned to work with a brain that sometimes acts more like a glitchy hard drive than a reliable record keeper.

Sometimes navigating my memory is like navigating back country roads. There’s a lot of approximation on distances, a lot of “just keep going until you see the old oak tree,” and plenty of wild guesses based on half-remembered landmarks. You’re not following a clean GPS route; you’re squinting at faded signs and hoping for the best. Inevitably, you’re going to miss the turn and end up rattling down a gravel road you definitely didn’t mean to take.

Some memories are like familiar crossroads—you know you’ve been there before, but you can’t remember if you should’ve turned left in 2009 or right in 2015. Others are like ghost towns: you know something important happened there, but the buildings are collapsed, the signposts are missing, and you can’t piece together what the place used to look like. And then there are the weirdly clear landmarks—like the exact smell of diesel at a gas station or the sound of gravel crunching under your tires—that stick out even when the rest of the journey is a blur.

So instead of a smooth, predictable highway of memories, it’s more like wandering backroads with a sketchy map scribbled on a napkin. You’ll eventually get somewhere, but probably not without a few wrong turns, dead ends, and moments of, “Wait… have I been here before?”

I recognize, with the knowledge I’ve gained over the years, that the gaps in my memory aren’t because I’m careless or broken—it’s because my brain is basically saying, “Nah, bae, let’s not go there. Lemme just keep you warm and safe over here instead.” It’s like a bouncer at a club door, redirecting me somewhere else before I even get close, deciding that what’s behind that rope is off-limits.

In its own way, my brain thinks it’s doing me a favor. It reroutes me toward safer mental territory, away from the heavy stuff it doesn’t think I can handle in the moment. And that redirection isn’t gentle—sometimes it’s like being dropped off in the middle of a random memory cul-de-sac with no context for how I got there. I’ll be trying to recall a conversation, or a whole stretch of time, and instead my mind plops me down in some irrelevant detail—like the color of a wall, or the sound of someone’s shoes clicking on tile.

The frustrating part is that those “gaps” aren’t really gaps at all—they’re more like locked rooms. The memory exists, but the access hallway is barricaded by my nervous system saying, “Nope, you’re not ready. Don’t even try.” And until I’ve built the tools or the sense of safety to actually peek inside, my brain would rather keep me in the waiting room, flipping through old magazines, than risk me opening a door it thinks will set off alarms.

It’s embarrassing sometimes. Someone will casually ask me about my childhood—“What was your favorite toy?” or “What were birthdays like when you were little?”—and I’ll go digging in my brain for an answer, only to come up completely empty-handed. It’s like opening the fridge, swearing there’s food in there, and being greeted by nothing but a lonely jar of mustard. I just end up sitting there slack-jawed, trying to play it off, while inside I’m screaming, “Sorry, memory not found—please try again later.”

And it’s not that the memories never existed—it’s that my brain has done its best impression of a block of Swiss cheese, and those particular slices are full of holes. Sometimes I get a random crumb—like the smell of the school cafeteria or the color of one of my childhood bedroom walls—but the actual story, the thing people are asking about? Gone. Deleted scene. Left on the cutting room floor.

That’s the weird double-punch of it: the moment itself isn’t painful, but the gap is. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own history, like everyone else got handed the extended director’s cut of your life, and you’re stuck watching the chopped-up version with missing reels. And all you can really say is, “Yeah…Sorry, Swiss cheese strikes again.”

There’s a soul-crushingness to it, though, too—to not remember much of your childhood. It’s not just an inconvenience, it’s an ache. When everyone else is gathered around trading misty-eyed stories about the “good old days,” you’re left with… blankness. They get to toss around “Remember when…?” like confetti, weaving shared memories into warmth and connection, while you’re stuck on the outside of that circle, trying to smile along but secretly scrambling for scraps you don’t have.

And it’s not just about the conversations you can’t join in—it’s about the longing underneath. Longing for the missing bits. Longing for the version of childhood that maybe could have been, if your brain hadn’t been forced to turn down the lights just to get you through. Because the gaps aren’t random, and you know that on some level. You know those blanks exist for a reason, that they’re covering over things you weren’t ready—or safe enough—to hold. And yet, even with that knowledge, there’s still a hollow kind of grief. You miss not only what you can’t recall, but also what you never actually had in the first place.

It’s a double-layered loss: the absence of memory, and the absence of the experiences those memories might have been made from. And that’s a hard thing to sit with, because the people around you are reminiscing about birthday parties and first pets and summer vacations, while you’re sitting there carrying a silence that feels heavier than any story you could tell.

That longing doesn’t just stay neatly tucked into the past, either—it seeps forward, shaping how you move through the present. Sometimes it looks like an obsession with nostalgia—clinging to old cartoons, songs, or trinkets from decades ago, because even if they weren’t your exact memories, they feel like they could’ve been. It’s a way of borrowing someone else’s scrapbook when yours is missing half its pages.

Other times, it shows up as over-documenting. Maybe you’re the friend who takes too many photos, who saves every receipt, who journals every little thing—not because you’re sentimental in the stereotypical sense, but because some part of you is terrified of losing more. If your childhood is a blank, then adulthood becomes a desperate attempt to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.

And sometimes it’s quieter, but no less powerful. Maybe you find yourself craving safety and stability with an intensity that feels out of proportion, because part of you is still trying to retroactively give your younger self the consistency she didn’t get. Or maybe you lean hard into rituals—making the same breakfast every morning, clinging to holiday traditions, insisting on routines—because those anchors provide the continuity your memory can’t.

In all these ways, the absence becomes its own kind of presence. The missingness echoes through your adulthood, shaping the way you try to hold on to what is happening now, and coloring the things you long for with a deeper hunger than most people ever realize.

So what do you do with a brain that trap-doors itself the second it decides something might hurt you? A brain that yanks you offstage mid-scene and refuses to hand over the script? The first thing you do is accept it. Not in a passive, “welp, guess I’m doomed” kind of way, but in the radical acceptance sense—acknowledging that this is how your brain has been trying to protect you. Fighting the mechanism only makes you feel broken; recognizing it for what it is reframes it as survival, not failure.

That acceptance doesn’t magically fix the gaps, but it shifts your relationship to them. Instead of demanding, “Why can’t I remember?” you start asking, “What is my brain keeping me safe from?” You begin to understand that the trap door isn’t punishment—it’s a security system. And while yes, it’s frustrating and sometimes downright humiliating, it’s also proof that your body has been working overtime to keep you alive through things that weren’t easy to live through.

From that place of acceptance, you can move into curiosity and care—learning tools to gently approach those locked rooms in your memory without battering the door down. But it starts with recognizing that the trap door itself isn’t weakness. It’s your brain’s way of saying, “Not yet. You’re still breathing, and that’s enough.”

And that’s the thing of it, isn’t it? At the end of the day, you can’t strong-arm your way into perfect recall. You can’t brute-force your brain into coughing up what it’s decided to hide. All you can really do is move through the memory loss. You learn to accept the bits and pieces you do have—the odd flashes, the random details, the little fragments that slip through the cracks—and trust that sometimes, as you lean into that acceptance, your brain may surprise you by handing over a little more. Not all at once, not neatly, but enough to remind you that healing isn’t static.

By treating your brain with patience instead of punishment—by choosing gentleness over self-blame—you create the conditions for it to soften. The same goes for treating yourself with compassion. When you approach those gaps with curiosity instead of judgment, you shift the story from, “I’m broken, I can’t remember,” to, “My brain did what it had to do to get me through.” That reframe isn’t just feel-good fluff—it’s a doorway into healing.

Because here’s the quiet truth: your brain isn’t hoarding those memories to spite you. It’s been guarding them. And when you meet it with grace, when you show yourself the care you truly deserve, you’re telling your nervous system it doesn’t have to stay in red-alert mode forever. That’s when healing has a chance to take root—not in force, but in the space you make for safety, compassion, and repair.

At the end of the day, depression and trauma don’t just mess with your memory—they mess with your sense of self. They warp time, scramble details, leave holes where whole chapters should be, and sometimes stitch pain into your recollections so tightly it feels impossible to separate the two. Whether it’s the fog of depression making life slide by in muted tones, or the spotlight-and-blackout chaos of trauma, or the long-term corrosion of living in survival mode for years, the result is the same: your past feels unreliable, fragmented, or sometimes completely blank.

And that can be devastating. It can leave you aching for the memories you don’t have, for the nostalgia you can’t join in on, for the continuity that seems to come so easily to everyone else. It can feel lonely, embarrassing, even soul-crushing at times. But here’s what I hope you take away from this episode: none of this is a reflection of your worth, your effort, or your ability to care. It’s your brain’s way of keeping you alive when life demanded survival over scrapbooking.

The good news? Brains are elastic. They can change. They can heal. We may not get back every lost file, but we can create new ones. We can lean on external supports—journals, photos, voice memos, friends who remind us of what we did last week. We can rebuild trust in our memory through gentle cognitive exercise. We can integrate fragments through therapy, through movement, through giving our nervous system permission to rest. And we can cultivate compassion for ourselves when memory loss shows up—because it’s not failure, it’s evidence of survival.

So maybe your life story doesn’t come in one clean, unbroken reel. Maybe it looks more like a mosaic—fragmented pieces, blurry sections, missing tiles, and a few parts burned at the edges. But even mosaics are art. Even broken pieces can be arranged into something whole, something beautiful, something that tells the truth about what you’ve lived through and who you are.

And if there’s one through-line I want to leave you with, it’s this: your worth has never been dependent on perfect recall. You are not less whole because parts of your story went unrecorded. You’re here, you survived, and you’re still adding chapters. And that, in itself, is worth remembering.

So here’s where we land. Memory loss in the wake of depression and trauma isn’t laziness, and it’s not a personal flaw. It’s survival logic, plain and simple. Your brain, in all its messy brilliance, made the call: focus on breathing, focus on getting through this moment, focus on not breaking apart. And while that trade-off can leave you with foggy timelines, Swiss-cheese recall, or entire chapters missing, it also means you’re still here. You survived what your nervous system told you was unbearable. That’s not failure—that’s proof of endurance.

And yet, I know how heavy it feels. I know the ache of sitting silent when friends swap childhood stories, of staring at the blank spaces where your own memories should be, of longing for details you may never get back. There’s grief in that. There’s loneliness. And there’s a very real temptation to blame yourself. But here’s the thing: you didn’t choose this. Your brain chose survival. And that choice, while imperfect, is what carried you through.

What you can choose now, though, is how you meet yourself in the aftermath. You can offer yourself compassion instead of shame. You can use external tools—journals, photos, conversations—to lay down new breadcrumbs for future-you to follow. You can strengthen the muscle of recall through gentle practice, one small win at a time. And when you’re ready, you can sit with a therapist, or a trusted guide, and start weaving the fragments into a story that feels less jagged, less chaotic, and more your own.

Will you recover every lost moment? No. Some memories are gone, and grieving that loss is valid. But you can reclaim your narrative in other ways. You can create new memories with intention, new chapters that belong fully to you. You can learn to hold both the holes and the solid ground with grace. Because your story is not just what you remember—it’s also what you lived, and what you’re still living now.

So if your life feels less like a straight line and more like a mosaic of broken glass and blurry photographs, remember this: mosaics are still art. They are beautiful because of their fragments, not in spite of them. Your mind might not have recorded every moment, but your existence is proof that those moments happened. And the life you’re building now—the clarity, the connections, the healing—is a memory in the making.

And maybe, that’s the most important thing to carry forward: you’re not defined by what you can’t remember. You’re defined by the fact that you’re here, breathing, moving, choosing, creating new pieces for your story every single day. And that, dear listener, is worth remembering.

If today’s episode hit home for you—whether you saw your own memory gaps in what I shared, or you just learned something new about how depression and trauma shape the brain—remember you don’t have to hold it all alone. Talk about it with someone you trust, jot a note to yourself, sit with the reminder that what you’re experiencing has a reason, you can even email me at Michelle@ONeilCounseling.com . There’s nothing broken about you—you’ve just been surviving.

If you found this episode helpful, please make sure to follow Shrink Wrapped wherever you listen, leave a review if you can, and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Your support really does help keep this conversation going.

And of course, don’t forget to join me next week. Until then, be gentle with your mind, be kind to yourself, and I’ll see you back here soon.