Fraudulent Forgetting
We are all familiar with forgetting.
The fight that you had with your friend ruined your friendship. You just want to erase it from your memory. The guilt of not being able to take good care of your parents sucks you up, and so you don't want to remember. War veterans often face PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and find it difficult to live a normal life. They earnestly seek a delete button to put an end to all raging and haunting memories. There are many such small, yet painful, memories that we do not want to remember. So, we find that forgetting has a pretty good track record of maintaining peace and harmony in our lives. These reminds me of Fredrich Nietzsche words:
"Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all."
School days are another example. Sitting in the examination hall and stressing a lot to remember what I studied on that page to grab 10 marks. In the cultural evening, "I forgot my dialogue seeing the big crowd" is not uncommon. These are some of the pitfalls of forgetting.
So, we see that sometimes forgetting helps us cope well with the situation. It helps us heal and restores our peace. On the other hand, forgetting brings losses, but these losses are not associated with fatalities. For example, when we forget an answer in the exam, we will get fewer marks or we might fail too, but that is not harming me or anyone else. In fact, this tells us that either we have not put in a complete effort or were distracted while preparing. It calls for finding the cause and rectifying it.
These aspects are, in some way, building ourselves. They say that there is something that is not allowing the right things to take place in your life. In other words, you are becoming aware of yourselves. This means that you are growing and improving.
Then the question comes: what is the evil side of forgetting, for which I have used the adjective fraudulent? Nothing seems fraudulent in forgetting; then why did I use it?
Wait for a while; even forgetting can sometimes be fraudulent. Fraudulent means the activity is done with the intention of deception. Now, I will try to show you how this forgetting plays a deceptive role and takes us far away from reality and our true inner selves.
I have a few close people doing it very frequently, but I will try to show something from my own life. That time, I was a student nurse. I did something wrong, and when people inquired about it, I straight forward, without any doubt, said, "I don't know." Right then, my inner self said, "See, you said a lie." I did not attend to it and just remained quiet all the time. I did not accept the correction of my inner self, and this led me to lose my peace of mind. Further, since the first time I did not have the courage to listen to my inner self and correct myself, I will never correct myself but will keep hiding like this. So, we comfortably forget what is not fitting in our frame and delete it forever, refusing correction. This is not good. You all might be saying that this does not happen. I would say to you all that at least once you accept your fault in front of others, you will feel the joy of being yourself, and then you will never wish to hide under such lies by forgetting things. From that incident onwards, I started observing my moves and found that my mouth was full of "no." I was never wrong, but others are. I was able to do this because I had tasted before the pleasure of accepting one's own mistakes and how peacefully we sleep then. I had practiced this for a while without fearing the consequences.
I will share one instance where I accepted my mistake without forgetting, and that helped me grow. In my first year of independent professional life, I read the instructions and was not aware of the procedure that was mentioned. So, knowing what I knew, I instructed my junior to do so. It was preparation for surgery. The next day, the procedure cannot be done. On inquiry, my name came up. I was approached. I admitted that yes, I gave the wrong instruction, and I apologized for the same. This made my coworkers trust me that I would not put them in wrong. I have seen people blame others for their mistakes and never confess them. (This shows poor leadership skills in them.) Even though I was wrong, they all never refused to work with me. Later on, we all did good teamwork jobs. Referring back to the example of lying, I was able to pick up this fraudulent forgetting, which started operating in me once again because I had developed insecurities within myself. I worked on them all to restore my true self again. Here I will quote from an anonymous author:
The message is: don't hide under the shade of forgetting; rather, build your relationships with everyone facing your mistakes, weaknesses, and incapabilities. None of us are perfect, and we are all humans. We can all make mistakes and have weaknesses and incapabilities. Let us face them and make a greener world. I will close the discussion with Malcolm Muuggeridge quote:
"Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream."
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