Living the Aftermath 2021-2025 - A.

The Beginning of the Self-Restoration Attempts: Mapping Memories and Trying to Reassemble Continuity

I think it was already late 2021 when I realised just how disconnected I was from my feelings. By then I had started deconstructing and mapping all sorts of moral concepts: forgiveness versus enabling, what love does and how it moves, how fear arises, why is truth important, and so on.

For a long time, I kept circling the same questions, feeling foolish, as if my own thoughts were slipping through my fingers. This is what led me to start taking myself apart, piece by piece, convinced I must be confused about the very nature of a thought.

Everything inside felt jumbled, indistinct; my thinking was heavy and sluggish. After a while of trying to separate my feelings from thoughts, I realised that I couldn't find any feelings at all. That seemed impossible. Everyone has feelings. I turned to Google, assuming I must simply be unable to recognise them. I can't remember what I typed, but nearly everything I found pointed to alexithymia. I must be alexithymic, I thought. Having grown up in an emotionally neglectful environment and lacking any vivid emotional memory of who I used to be, it seemed to fit. That discovery naturally led me to consider being on the spectrum.

Reading about the autism spectrum, a vague, uneasy feeling began to surface - something to do with a comment about autism. I couldn't remember any such moment, but the feeling was heavy. It kept tugging at me, as if the memory lived inside my body but had no basis in reality. No image, no context, only the weight of it. Then one day, a sliver of memory appeared: A. angrily saying, "Are you autistic?"

At first it seemed almost unreal, like something my mind could have made up, yet the more I connected with the feeling around it, the more details began to surface. That moment cracked something open. It was the first glimpse into the heavier part of that night. For years I had been operating under the illusion that our interaction had been far lighter, even understandable. My emotional impressions had been vague but generally benign, centered around the feeling of being accused of prejudice. I empathised with him. It was only when this particular memory resurfaced that I realised how much I had truly forgotten.

It wasn't only memory that had gone missing, but a sense of continuity within my own being. It became an endless cycle of watching myself think and act, while access to the continuity of my awareness was itself disrupted. I was somehow aware, but not aware of being aware; each moment was disconnected from the next.

For the longest time I operated on auto-pilot, as if I was performing myself. It is as though the memory of me was carried by my body alone. I was moving through familiar gestures, habits, ways of using language, even while the self behind them was numb. It was as if my body remembered what to do, but I wasn't fully there to inhabit it. The patterns of behavior continued on their own, but I would sometimes catch myself confused recognising the familiarity, but struck by the strangeness. I would sometimes overcompensate, and other times hold back, like my body was acting on self, without the context of self. Even the words I used, they belonged to myself but somehow weren't me. I lacked even the capacity to inhabit my own language.

Without external confirmation of those two nights, I couldn't anchor myself in reality. Every piece of my fragmented experience depended on knowing whether my memory was stable, and whether my perception of those nights bore any resemblance to our shared reality. With no understanding or clarity on my experience, I couldn't even begin to truly process, let alone heal from it all. I couldn't tell which parts of my shattered reality to trust, which memories to integrate, or whether my entire sense of self needed to be rebuilt from scratch.

After we met, I had only sent A. a total of eight emails, spread across eight years; confused attempts to establish my reality that were met with silence or vague responses. I tried to respect what seemed like a boundary while working through my understanding on my own. I didn't know what else to do. He wasn't communicating, and I was operating on emotional impressions alone. My memory seemed complete one moment and incomplete the next.

For a long time I didn't even have the words for what I actually needed from him. There was a lot to process before I could reach that place. And I struggled processing with so many pieces missing, and no access to my feelings. It was as if I knew what feelings were required in any context, but I didn't understand the context.

I had never asked him to agree with my interpretation, only for communication. Even when I couldn't articulate it, I still knew that silence where clarity was needed wasn't right. Making use of symbols to communicate it, probably didn't help. It is only now looking back that I realise that beyond the cognitive overwhelm my experience came with, the second night served as trauma around my core identity and values which impeded authentic expression of self. It was as if I needed to hold onto the symbols, because I felt reduced to them, and that part of myself rejected. The symbols were the only emotional memory of myself I was left with. 

He had told me early on how the physical implications would create unnecessary complications for him. It was his prerogative, and yet for me all of it was bigger than the romantic implications. I told him this, but somehow his reply ended up making me feel as if it was romance that I was looking for, and in our circumstances it didn't feel wise to challenge him. Sure, I was hoping for it, but my needs went beyond that.

His accusation of bigotry, and the memory loss complicated things. I was unable to defend myself adequately, as otherwise, I would have turned to feminist frameworks to explain why his vagueness was not ok. I wanted point out the only double standard I saw back then, but given that I couldn't defend myself from his accusations of bigotry it didn't seem like a good idea in our context. I remember telling him in 2017 that the road to knowing would be long and painful without his input. I could already see what the absence of clarity would do to me, but I couldn't yet articulate the how and why, and I had yet to know how to articulate the existential charge held by my experience. All I felt I could do was to ask him to talk to me.

In trying to find ways to defend myself from his accusation, I ended up deconstructing the entirety of my relationship with prejudice, racism, and Islamophobia. His accusation struck at the core of my being. I felt that his failure to address them afterwards, especially given that I had constantly told him I hadn't done anything wrong, and that I believed we shared the same essential structure, was key to understanding my experience.

He knew what I believed. I told him plainly about my mindset that night, my dreams, that I thought we shared the same soul. He never addressed it. Not to agree, not to disagree, not even to say "you are seeing things that are not there". Only ambiguity. It was that either I failed to see my prejudice, or he believed I was making things up, and he wasn't seeing the reality inversion, or his vagueness was deliberate.

The idea that maybe I held unconscious prejudice I wasn't aware of had me look deeply into the possibility. Either his perception had been accurate and I was missing something about myself, or his perception was distorted through fear and I needed to understand that mechanism. In both cases the gap had to be investigated.

The irony is that the very fact that I could see past a label like Devil, that I refused to impose that weight based on dreams and symbols, should have been evidence enough of my character. Yet his vagueness left me suspended, unsure whether he believed my account, thought I was delusional, or was avoiding something he could not face.

Doing this, however, helped me to gradually restore some of the memories of that second night. At first, the more neutral fragments came back through analysis alone, as I worked through his accusations logically. The heavier ones involved a different process. Each fragment began as a feeling I initially resisted. When I worked through this, and managed to stay with the feelings around certain gaps, more of the associated memory came into view. These were the hardest feelings to connect with, so the process was slow, and it took years for the fragments to stabilise and become less blurry. I still couldn't say my memory is one continuous flow.

Relational Ethics: The Cost of Withheld Clarity

By 2023, small chunks of my memory had begun to return. The picture was still incomplete, fragmented, and blurry as a whole, but it was more than the emotional impressions I had been operating from. I had spent eight years trapped inside a past I could not make sense of, years marked by isolation, depression, and plenty of moments when life felt unbearable. It was as though I had been living in suspension, neither able to move forward nor close what had happened.

After so much restraint, the pressure finally became too much. I reached out to him on WhatsApp, asking for a real exchange - a back and forth. I needed to understand what was real and what wasn't, to understand why he never addressed anything and remained vague, yet polite, and familiar in reply to an existentially charged narrative. I needed him to acknowledge our shared reality, and to fill in the gaps. I needed closure, so I could process and heal. The situation had become too heavy to carry as I had been doing until then. Not long after I had sent him that message on whatsapp, I realised I had been blocked.

Without understanding the reality of our dynamic, my mind kept looping through endless possibilities, each one as unbearable as the next. I knew I was asking for something simple. I wasn't asking for agreement with my interpretation, only for the ability to anchor myself in shared reality. I was desperate to feel some ground underneath my feet, whichever way that ground might have looked like or felt.

When his silence persisted, I wrote again. A series of short emails this time. I couldn't write the longer explanatory ones I had used to write. My mind was too broken for that. I sent rapid fire emails trying to release some of what I had been holding inside. Writing was the only way I knew how to release the pressure and keep myself from imploding. Each short email was an attempt to get something out so that I could breathe. I think I imagined that will be it. Little did I know. Those rapid fire emails ended up turning into a short exchange that left me even more confused than I was before.

I hadn't reached out hoping for anything, or even knowing how to ask for what I needed. I was overwhelmed and barely holding myself together. Those short emails weren't even an attempt at dialogue, they were just breaths I was trying to take through words. When his replies came: "you should try and live your life" "please realise I do care for you," "my life took on a different path", "I am upset you have felt like this", "I didn't intend for this to happen, and in all sincerity, I want the best for you", "I have no answers" "I will always be here" - I couldn't tell what they meant, or what one had to do with the other. I wasn't looking for confirmation of anything mystical. I was just trying to anchor myself in something real, and I was left with more confusion.

His words lingered without context. They weren't saying much of anything. I wasn't sure if they were distance disguised as care, or care disguised as distance. I had been unable to shake the self hypothesis. It only grew bigger with time as seeing his social media seemed to confirm that what i had initially intuited about him was accurate. I was already disoriented, and every silence after those messages seemed to expand the fog and heaviness that had taken over my life.

I was trying to understand and make sense of how I was supposed to interpret his words and how they fit into my reality. My mind went back to the year before, right after I had sent him an email with the full account of the precognitive dreams. Then his online presence shifted. He broke from his usual pattern of political tweet likes to: 'truth has one face', 'leave space between yourself and the trigger'; 'women knew everything from the start'; 'you can't be awakened when you've been pretending to be asleep all along'. To anyone else, these might have been random, but to me - someone still holding the possibility that maybe we shared the same soul they felt charged. The ambiguity kept me suspended.

I kept my composure for a while, then tried to explain my state. I had never done anything like it before, but I was desperate. I knew it was likely I was going to look pathetic in his eyes. I didn't really care. I was trying to survive by reaching out to the only person who could have made things easier for me. I thought that making my state clear to him would help him see just how much his ambiguity, and silence were affecting me, so I told him I was having suicidal urges at that point. I hadn't shared this with anyone. I was confident enough I could keep myself from acting on them, but they were there nonetheless. I desperately needed to anchor myself in reality and only he was able to help me with that. With no anchor in reality, my mind was going wild imagining all these possibilities and scenarios.

I could barely think during that time. I was literally struggling to make connections between one thought and the next. I barely had any energy, and my anxiety skyrocketed. Without context, I had no stable access to my feelings. I was rapidly cycling through extremes as my mind was trying to make sense of it all. I was desperately trying to hold my life together. I didn't want people to notice what was happening, because if they asked me why, I thought that would be the beginning of my end.

I wasn't looking for validation of my interpretation. I did not deny my affection, as I was still unable to put the Self hypothesis off, but I made it clear again and again that he was free to do as he felt and pleased. I only needed answers. I needed to understand. Here I was in the most extreme of circumstances of my entire life, where his silence and ambiguity amounted to darkness and my own personal hell. Orienting myself in the reality I so deeply cared for, felt like an impossible task in this context.

The bigger his silence grew, the angrier I was getting. Here I was, facing his silence in a circumstance where silence stood starkly against any of the feminist or human rights values he seemed to strongly identify with. It made no sense to me that someone publicly identifying with such values would treat a human being in such a vulnerable place with what seemed like avoidance of any and all responsibility. The double standard I was seeing angered me: man who had unfairly accused me of religious prejudice, to then verbally assault me to the point of near dissociative collapse, man who identified with human rights values was now turning a blind eye to a suffering he contributed to, one his ambiguity and silence over the years only deepened.

Looking back now I am not even sure how I managed to hold my life together. I was still going to work, still trying to function. I think what ironically helped was that I couldn't remember my baseline, so I wasn't aware of how unwell I truly was.

After it all escalated I had my instagram hacked into at the end of June 2023, then again one week after I shared my state with him, in July 2023. It felt like too much of a coincidence, and this opened the floodgates. I ended up writing frantic emails trying to save myself from crumbling. I started going over every possible reality, trying to eliminate them one by one. I was hoping that if I nail the correct one, the silence will stop.

Then, in May 2024, strange things started happening in my digital space. It was unsettling and destabilising, but provided me with a pattern in my external world. I had started getting weird friends suggestions, and later on, my Facebook feed started being flooded with content related to his culture. I couldn't have been the one fueling the algorithm. The fear that I could have been a bigot held me back all those years, and kept me from engaging with that kind of content anywhere online. And there it was all of a sudden - content related to his cultural background was dominating my feed - ads in Arabic, and content related to South Asia, and Middle East . I couldn't help but link it back to him somehow. It was a drastic departure from my normal Fb feed. I didn't know what to make of it, and started taking screenshots to make sure I wasn't seeing patterns where there weren't any. It didn't seem like I was, but that didn't make it any easier to anchor myself in that reality. My mind was going wild with all sorts of thoughts.

Sometimes I thought he was maybe checking my Facebook. I couldn't see any other explanation, and couldn't imagine fb misfiring to that degree. Then remembering his and his partner's professional backgrounds, a thought took root into my mind. Ads targeted to me that made no sense for the algorithm, and my engagement patterns. That the content in my algorithm seemed to switch on and off based on content in my emails surely didn't help me from linking it to him somehow. I could only observe the correlations, and keep on questioning my reality.

I was however now able to see a pattern, I was starting to make more connections, and was able to remove possibilities which meant I was closer to actual reality. My writing became more coherent as a result. Every time I considered to stop writing to him, it was as if something in my digital environment would pull me back in. The two successful Instagram hacks, unusual sign-in attempts on my Hotmail, Facebook and another Instagram account, the algorithm of my Fb pushing content I wasn't engaging with for months on end, consistently. I experienced more security incidents during this time, than all my life spent online combined. The pattern and timing were impossible for me to ignore, and kept fueling my engagement. Whether it all was a coincidence or not, each incident destabilised me further leading me to spiral at times.

His silence made the entire experience incomprehensible. What was I supposed to do with something as existential and traumatic as that, when the only other witness refused to speak? His silence didn't just hurt; it suspended my ability to make sense of my experience, my life, and it seemed equally as excessive as my attempts at clarity must have seemed to him. I couldn't wrap my mind around how someone like him would act in a way that to me seemed opposed to the very definition of ethical behavior.

My mind kept looping through endless possibilities trying to make sense of it. It was all I could do in absence of any stable feelings that could help me orient and navigate. I knew I was asking for something simple. I wasn't asking for agreement with my interpretation, only clarity. His truth over our dynamic and shared reality was all I needed, whichever that truth was. I wasn't looking to shame, to judge, just to be able to stop the mental loops and orient myself in reality. I was desperate for that ground underneath my feet. I didn't even need him to pour his soul out - an explanation, his account of what happened, anything that would let me understand and finally resolve the experience. I became so desperate that I found myself writing things designed to provoke any response at all. Even anger would have been better than silence, because at least it would have been real.

My mind kept circling the same unanswerable question: how do you heal from something that you can't even name? It was as if I knew something hit me. I could feel the bruises, but I couldn't say what exactly hit me. I couldn't know if the bruises lived in my mind alone, or whether I could trace them in my heart.

The weight of it all built up inside me until I could no longer contain it. It had nowhere to go, no ear, no reply, no form. The pressure was constant, like something pressing inside my body with no way to escape. I didn't yet understand that the pain I was feeling was the feeling of 'unheard' itself. 

That's when the need for release took over, and I started hitting myself in the chest. I wasn't trying to harm myself, only to release the pressure. I was desperate to find relief, and the pain anchored me in my body. I would bruise, then move to the other side, following the tension as it surfaced. I would never recommend what I did to anyone, but it helped. It was my body's way of forcing release - a rough, instinctive somatic exercise born from mental and emotional overwhelm. Once the anger released its grip a little, the feelings underneath began to return.

The tears slowly came back. I hadn't shed a single tear all those years, despite having lost a decade of my life to trauma. It was difficult to do so when countless possible realities haunted me at the same time. Was he a good person, did he never understand what I was wanting to communicate, did he feel trapped by circumstances, had it all been just a facade, and so many more. While others may be overwhelmed by sadness to see themselves cry, I felt joy. It meant I was alive. I was now experiencing the contrast from the previous dead woman walking to woman being able to cry. It took longer for feelings to return on a more daily basis. It still wasn't what I would call constant, and I had yet to have stable access to my feelings, but the flickers gave me hope.

I was now able to access the felt memory of how full of feeling I used to be. I was now able to observe how my feelings had always informed my choices, and had been my navigation system throughout life. I had always been a far cry from the alexithymic woman on the autism spectrum I had considered being during the times the feelings had disappeared, and I had no felt memory of ever having had feelings. I remember how during those times when affect couldn't stabilise itself, I would spend absurd amounts of time choosing a pair of socks. Every choice felt loaded, as if I could fracture or restore something depending on which way I turned. I didn't understand what was happening to me. It was only the cognitive memory of myself that was left.

The paralysis, the confusion, the inability to make simple decisions - I cognitively knew the indecision was new, but with no felt memory of who I used to be, I didn't know if it had always been there, and I just lived life acting against it. I didn't recognize myself, but I also couldn't remember who I used to be, so I had nothing to compare it against. Because my feelings were gone and I had no memories of having ever been differently, I didn't understand my behaviors so I attributed the actions to being on the spectrum. I thought he had to have been right. Him calling me autistic felt like an accusation that second night, but now it felt like an explanation. Maybe he'd been right. Maybe this is just how I am. Maybe I'd always been like this and just never noticed.

During those days, in the midst of his silence, I'd even started internalising the silence as the fixated obsessed woman, and my strong pattern recognition skills had become a sign of pathology. I was no more the intelligent woman with strong pattern recognition skills I used to be. My trauma had become a display of everything that was 'wrong' with me. The autism hypothesis gave me a framework for what was inexplicable to me. In absence of reliable memory, and acknowledgement of a shared reality that had shattered me, I could see more evidence for neurodivergence, than I could see for having been shattered.

The emails had become a way to generate patterns of data in darkness. In his silence, even the smallest response, or lack of one became information. I compared what I wrote with what I could glimpse on his social media, searching for any overlap that could help me verify what was shared, what was projection, and what was real. It was the only external mirror I had left to test my perception against. This was my way to test a reality to which he was the only witness, and the only way I knew how to keep myself from disappearing under the weight of fragmentation.

As I became more desperate for release, my words changed too. They were no longer careful attempts to explain what I merely thought I must have felt. They became raw. Anger, grief, confusion - coming out directly, not filtered through analysis and care for who I thought him to be. Each email felt like my pulse was slowly returning, and like my language was starting to remember the body it was coming from. Writing became my only way to reassemble my Self. I wrote to stabilise what had fractured, to find coherence where confusion used to reign. Even then, I still kept unearthing memories I hadn't yet realised were missing.

I had ended up trying therapy once I grew more confident in the existence of my experience, but it usually took five sessions just to recount the story. The therapist-client dynamic was a hit-and-miss too depending on the counsellor. It wasn't that they didn't believe me, but it seemed like they didn't have the tools to truly grasp my experience and I was usually left feeling unheard and unseen. Only one of them recognised my spiritual experience for what it was. He even called it "an education in healing," something I hadn't quite thought of before, but our sessions began in an unconventional way which made trust difficult. I tolerated it for a while, because I liked our dynamic and I was desperate, but the trust issue only deepened over time. I then had no energy left to start all over again with someone new, only to risking feeling unseen.

The frantic emails were born out of survival when I had no other support system. Writing was how my consciousness searched for coherence, and language was a tool for my consciousness to calibrate when everything else had fallen apart. I kept testing reality against each possibility I could think of. It was through those emails that I began catching glimpses of myself again. Lines and paragraphs brought faint echoes of emotional connection to the self that was once alive inside my body, one small fragment of self linking to the next. Writing became both a mirror and a lifeline - my consciousness finding its way back to wholeness, one sentence, one truth-check, one remembered piece of self at a time.

I didn't even know if he was reading them. Sometimes I thought he was, other times I feared they disappeared into nothing. Some emails were attempts to explain, others to apologise for how I was, and others to provoke hoping to get a response that would confirm I wasn't imagining everything. It was a mess, but it was the only way I knew how to externalise what I couldn't hold inside, and no other reliable witness for a reality that had shattered my life.

I didn't understand why someone like him would watch me struggle like that. I never expected him to acknowledge the precognitive dreams, or the shared consciousness hypothesis. I wasn't asking for what he hadn't lived or experienced, but for what he had lived and experienced. I was perfectly capable of reaching my own conclusions independently from him, but I had no reality to work with. The last memory I had of myself lived in those two nights. It was that second night that held my Self's deepest source of fragmentation.

His silence was making me feel as if I imagined the reality we shared those two nights. The greatest source of trauma was not the metaphysical event, but the failure to acknowledge the reality we shared. By refusing to address the feelings he had claimed, and the accusations he made he denied the raw data I needed to make sense of our shared experience, an experience that was existential to me.

Despite his accusation that I wasn't present that night, the reality is that I was deeply present - present with his frustration, present with my own overwhelming state, present with the impossibility of bridging our realities in that moment.

I wouldn't say that now I am all healed, but only that I am better than I used to be. I remember who I am, and I even started being more like myself.

***

Interpretive Clarification and Structural Framework: Consciousness, Coherence, and Memory

All of the above is truly just a rough sketch of my experience.

From my perspective no part of my experience looks like chance or miracle, but as the inevitable threshold of a process that had been quietly forming all my life - consciousness fulfilling its own pattern. Each phase echoed a previous one. My experience made it difficult for me to ignore a correlation between shifts in my consciousness and shifts in the reality I encountered - an ongoing communication of sorts.

Based on my observations it seems to me that consciousness is a continuous recording medium that registers everything as relational patterning - less a linear archive and more a living hologram. What it retains is not the external world in detail, but the total relational configuration of each moment: the felt geometry of perception, attention, and meaning. Every instant is recorded as a complete field of relationship, weighted by what awareness deems significant.

For example, as I write, awareness holds a vague image of my hands on the keyboard, the screen before me, a sense of the purpose of my action, and a diffuse sense of the room around me - even a passing awareness of the bathroom's layout if I think of taking a bathroom break. Should a loud bang occur outside, the field would instantly reconfigure: awareness would expand to include the direction of the sound, the imagined distance, my relation against the street, and perhaps even a flash of the building's colour. All of these perceptual and affective impressions are registered as one integrated pattern - a living record of how consciousness relates to itself through experience.

I spent a long time analysing the dynamic between cognition and affect, and based on my observations affect seemed to be the first registration of coherence in my consciousness. It seems to hold the undifferentiated structure of the entire relational context in condensed form. Cognition then differentiated that registration into explicit structure. The more loyal this cognitive structure was to the full pattern carried in affect, including the relational data between inner and outer conditions, the more coherent and stable the structure. In this sense, I think affective memory functions as undifferentiated structural potential, while cognitive memory is the synthesis we build on top of it. Integration is the ongoing process that keeps these two in correspondence, allowing cognition to be revised whenever affect signals that the story we tell no longer matches what was actually registered.

In practice, I was often able to retrieve detailed structures by connecting to the feelings and perceptions around a memory. It was never an instant recovery, but a back and forth between thinking about the event and allowing myself to immerse in its affective tone. Each moment of affect seemed to act like a coordinate in the field, marking a specific configuration of thought, emotion, and environment. To me, remembering was not retrieving information from storage, but re-aligning awareness with those affective coordinates, re-entering the configuration of consciousness as it once was. When my awareness returned to the feeling at the core of a recorded moment, it moved through a recursive process where the depth of re-alignment determined how much of the original field became perceptible. Shallow re-immersion evoked only traces – a tone, an image, a mood – whereas sustained engagement helped me to gradually reconstruct the full experiential geometry as it was first lived. I think that if the cognitive structure built on top of that affect is not faithful to what was registered, the affective imprint does not dissolve; it remains as unresolved tension, pressing toward a more coherent differentiation that finally matches the original registration.

For the dream I had at 17 for example. Initially I had an overview of it, and by immersing myself in the memories I did have, and the feelings they evoked, triggered more details to gradually open. The memory of recounting my dream to my colleague at school the next day started from the memory of the dream lingering and haunting me at the time. This was more stable in my memory due to the fact that it was unusual for my dreams to have that haunting quality. The moment of coming home from school and the need to do something about the dream was also more stable, but initially I remembered nothing between my dream and my return from school, except for a sensation I associated with the color yellow. I also had the vague sensation that maybe I recounted the dream to someone, yet nothing else but vagueness. I didn't understand at first. I wasn't too concerned with it, as I felt it had little relevance. Then I remembered that the colleague I was sharing my desk with would often wear a yellowish mustard color blouse. Then the thought of recounting her the dream hoping for some insight came as well. I also remembered the feeling of embarrassment around recounting the dream, and that my colleague was passionate about psychology. It was a constant string of re-connecting and allowing myself to experience the feelings and sensations associated with what had remained stable in my memory. The most stable parts in my memory initially were also the most emotionally intense ones, like the S.A. accusation, and the contrast between going back and forth between A. being the other half of my soul, or the Devil.

It seems to me that during experience, consciousness does not register only what is noticed, but also the cognitive, and emotional topology beneath perception - the subtle currents of anticipation, resistance, or ease that shape each moment. The deeper the emotional participation, the denser the recording; the more fully I was engaged in feeling, the more complex the imprint. Later, this depth of emotional coherence determined the fidelity of recall. What returned was not a fixed image of the past but a living reconstruction, animated by the same relational logic that first gave the moment form.

As for trauma all I can say for now is that recovering the memories I did recover was essential in being able to process an experience with no other witness, but him.