Positive Memory and a Broken Mind

I have to be active to retrieve positive memories.  My mind’s broken.  Left to it’s own devices it will tend to replay past trauma, old wars, resentments, failures.  It’s not surprising because those were by their nature times of threat and times that my mind had to focus most. In danger we are most alert. After danger passes my mind will tend to be scanning for future threats and reminding me of past dangers. I’ll also sometimes play scenarios again in search of whatever I might think I did that had I done differently would have resulted in a more positive outcome.
Meanwhile most of my life has been exceedingly positive. Every day I’m alive my life is 51% positive.  Yet trauma and failure have tendencies to blast aside the good days and the good experiences.
I had a Corolla. Amazing car. It was something I so enjoyed for it’s workmanship and maneuvering.  I loved the sound system. It was the days I played Steely Dan on the radio. Barbara Fromm was on CBC. Life was good. That little car had magnificent studded snow tires and for a year it carried me in summer and winter to and from my first country general practice.  It was a sweet car.  Yet a dangerous , horrible, incompetent, psychopathic driver hit that car passing in a lane, semi truck barreling towards us, I was doing the correct speed, the other fellow was speeding. The road conditions were black ice. He lost control of his car, hit the front end of mine causing me to barrel and burrow right into the ditch. The car flipped 360 degrees landing upright then rolling sideways 360 degrees and landing upright again.  The seat strap kept me in the car but because of the height of the car, made for Asian market I presumed, it didn’t keep me in my seat but allowed me to be crushed into the ceiling with my head tilted.  I had a cervical spine injury.  I gave the case to a friend to help him, a new lawyer, and he didn’t do so well, so that in the end, a year later, weeks of lost work and a life time of chronic pain and disability, I was severely punished by a psychopath speeding incompetent driver, a friend who was young like me, a tough insurance system. I got the replacement value of the brand new car and immediately bought a Ford Mustang which I truly loved.  But my life flashed before my eyes, It was a near death experience.  I was appalled at the price of the insurance and that in the end there was only punishment in the system for the victim. It changed my outlook on life and was a root cause in my changing my career, my marriage and might well have been an early root cause of the subsequent addiction year that really changed my life further a decade later.
So I don’t think of that car with the joy I can actively seek to remember.  With a little conscious probing I can remember the joy I had driving it. It would also be decades before I bought an Asian made car again.  I’m driving a Mini now, British,but with my head touching the ceiling. It’s got that same attention to detail the Toyota Corolla had. Marvelous workmanship.  But I could well have been driving it when the animal hit the front of my car and the criminal system didn’t castrate him there and then to insure his genetic strain was removed from the genome.
Being a civilized man I actually got out of my brutalized car which the insurance company subsequently insisted was just fine, no reason to be replaced,  never to be trustworthy in my mind again, a source of terror, a centre for ptsd images of life flashing before my eyes, but no , it drove so I should take it home as if nothing happened.  Assholes.  I’d love the ‘new car’ smell of that Corolla. I’d loved the faith I’d put in it. It was my first ‘new car’ as before that I’d only had second hand beaters.  So there was this insurance company insisting all was well and me remember every day for life that as I bounced off the ceiling of the car I thought that I knew no one who had survived a 360 forward turn and then when i rolled again over the ceiling my neck straining again, I thought I’ll never be the same because I don’t know people who survive such a crash.  It was a miracle. Everything about it was a miracle. But at the time I was surrounded by faithless friends who were caught up completely in their own life stories and were annoyed a bit by my ‘drama’.  “You crashed your car, what of it.” And some friend would then talk about a minor fender bender and the conversation would steer into a lot of oohing and aching about stuff people knew about , parking lot crashes and city bumps.  But even today I see that semi and feel that head over heels of the first smash on the roof the world coming round like a roller coaster and then the side ways rolling and the excruciating crunch of my body weight bent up against the ceiling, sustaining me because the strap didn’t hold me in the seat.
The other car was some young guys and girls , party animals in a big beater of an old boat , an Oldsmobile or something indestructible and it had just plowed me into the ditch and continued flat out across the prairie snow drifts.  Both cars would be a trial for tow trucks to get out. The deep snow cushioned the impact.
But when I see crashes on tv and watch the cars rolling, I rarely see something as intense as my own. It’s why I liked the Diesel XXX movies and Fast and Furious. The stunt men really owned their keep.  But I’m not a stunt driver. I was dressed in a suit and survived because the Toyota was such a strongly built car and the seat belt held me. If I was 2 inches shorter I’d not have crunched my neck.  But I survived.  I lived .
My mind is like that.  I was married a few times.  I sometimes have whisps of memories of those glorious days of love and roses, the ultimate romances, the extraorinary, love and lust, the close talks at dusk and dawn, the hours of fun together, the years of best friend relationships, the pride of having a partner so extraordinary in so many ways, beautiful, accomplished, brilliant, confident, successful, admired, and to have them with you, to be able to trust them, to do things together and be so intimate.  Years of that connection. The separation and divorces in my cases seemed to happen over the last year. The negative outweighed the positives. We part and then the courts and the lawyers and the government and friends and counselors and society just makes it all so much uglier.  And the loss is like an explosion dropped into the memory bank. It wipes out the whole amazing love story of two people who felt no other was the ‘one’, who felt they’d found their ‘soul mate’ and lived with love and carefree for years, amazingly, only to find that the indestructible thing of perfection wasn’t up to the task.
Now passively the wounds come back.  I can see the one judge who was as disgusting pig of a man studying my ex’s exposed cleavage and black lace hooker stockings that day of the divorce when her own lawyer looked more like a whore with her buttons undone and cleavage exposed.  I remember that and how later when I talked to other lawyers they told me she would have jockeyed for just that judge because he was such a perverted pig and a real disgusting womanizer in his personal life, a mommy’s boy, with a little dick and a need to win women and a history of consecutively finding against men in all divorce and custody cases because he’s such a loser.  Backstabbing psychopath.  That little weasel jumps right into my passive memory.  Especially learning about him from the lawyers and learning that there’s still a pedophile judge missing and me thinking it’s got to be him because he was such a type, but really, was he.  Yes, he was a 13 year old boy who had a big position and abused it and feared men and treated women as whores but.....and here’s the but...I’ve been divorced three times, 23 years of marriage, two decades of loving the enemy, providing and protecting for all that time and 90% of it was really good for ‘us’ but I left.  I walked out on two while she walked out on one. But the important thing was there three judges and only one was a smegma. The other two were saints. Amazing considerate gentlemen with genius and wisdom and love and care who ended the marriages with the least fan fare. True I was never one to ask for anything except my life back so I walked out without anything essentially, dividing the assets of one house and giving another away but the key is that I don’t dwell on these ‘gentlemen’.  They didn’t look at the women like they were meat and they didn’t talk to me like I was a fool. They were mensch.  They were Skookum men.
My mind passively drifts to the ugly little piece of stinky dog tourd. There is if I am ‘active’ about my memory these two great men who made a bad situation less bad. These two great men did their tough job with kindness and care.
I used to have a resentment against my mother for a thing she did when I was a teen. It wasn’t anything really but I was pimple faced and awkward and tended to be ‘sensitive’ in adolescence. I expect I’m the only such teen of that kind. I had attitude and Mom wasn’t always ‘tolerant’ and ‘enlightened’ about how she should talk to an asshole kid. So we had words and I held this resentment against her.  My mom is a saint. I can go on and on about the accomplishments of my parents which include not killing me but my mind used to go to that argument instead of to the times she held me as a child when I came to her afraid. I remember that now. The adolescent ‘bomb’ memory concealed the feeling of her taking me in her arms and holding me when I was hurt child. I can feel that today.  It was the work of therapy and doing a 12th step that brought home the insanity of the mind and how ‘selective bias’ worked in the brain.
My mind is broken.  I can fix it by remember that it’s going to lie to me about my life and the relationships I had and the people I knew.  I’m blessed and I have to actively remember the truth about my life.  The Toyota Corolla is an awesome car.  I’ve driven more than a half century on on kinds of roads with all kinds of other drivers around, in cars, trucks and on motorcycles.  I drive a lot. I’ve driven desserts and freeways, and across tundra and off road and on road.  So 99.9% of the time the other drivers are incredible. I’ve had a few accidents but statistically I drive about 10x as much as every one I know and I’ve driven in worse conditions and in different countries with a whole lot of my own and rental equipment.  So statistically, and in reality, other drivers are by and large amazing, and the very vast majority actually do have the intelligence to have figured out how to use the ‘turn’ signal for changing lanes.
But I have a broken mind and most people would know my descriptors of the one driver in the morning commute whose causing the traffic jam that day, one driver out of thousands.
Just saying.
I have to be ‘active’ and make my memory remember ‘truly’ and avoid the ‘emotional memory’ of ‘selective bias’ that suffers from such inaccuracy and causes me to have a skewed view of reality.  My life is blessed. I’m really thankful for all the people I’ve known and all the machines I’ve driven.
Thank you.