Survival

Ever since I read Rebecca Mott’s work, I have been thinking of the line:

‘I had to forget to survive but now I choose to remember to live.‘

I don’t know if it’s something I read in one of her articles — I don’t have the resilience to re-read them to check — or if it’s something I made up all by myself. It makes sense to me though.
Whoever said that you need to forget the past and just get on with your life was wrong: the trouble is that you can’t choose to forget. As John Irving put it, “Your memory is a monster. You forget, it doesn’t. It just files things away; it keeps things from you, and brings them to your recall at a will of its own.”
It’s impossible to be able to get over the past unless you deal with your memories. To be able to deal with them, you must remember them.

Writings by Rebecca Mott can be found at:
[1] A Personal Memory of Prostitution: http://feministfire.wordpress.com/2008/01/16/a-personal-memory-by-rebecca-mott/
[2] Sometimes I Can Dream: http://feministfire.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/always-remember-and-sometimes-i-can-dream-by-rebecca-mott/
[3] Always Remember: http://spinningspinsters.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/always-remember-by-rebecca-mott/