I'm consumed with things I don't want to forget.

“I must say that I challenged myself when I agreed and committed to writing this blog. I’m really challenging myself for committing to doing it once a week. Some of my post take a day or two, to recover from. On average I spend about two to three days decompressing after I post a blog. I needed to decompress at least three times while I was in the middle of writing this week’s blog. I don’t drink when I write. When I first started writing I would, but not now. I love whiskey, but whiskey is nothing but intoxicating sugar. This quarantine has not made keeping off the pounds easy. I’ll probably meet myself in the middle and drink wine. I’m a red wine drinker. I just started learning how to drink wine so don’t think I’m some snob because I know what I like. This week has been very up-and-down.  I don’t know what’s going on in this country. I don’t know if we’ll ever recover. It doesn’t seem like we will at the rate we’re going. I just keep writing with the hope that people will find what I write worthy of supporting so I may survive. Honest moment. Let’s get into the blog shall we.”   

I may have had a minor panic attack this week. My panic attacks are fascinating to me. I never realize I’m having one until I’m already in the thick of it. I have a thought, and then I proceed to talk to myself about whatever that thought is until I end up at the bottom of a rabbit hole, alone. This particular panic attack was brought on when I decided to organize every thought that I’ve managed to write down over the past 20 years. Since the quarantine began, I’ve been trying to find different projects to do in my apartment to pass the time. I have somehow made myself believe that, once I organize my apartment, the quarantine will be over. My apartment is a reflection of how my mind operates. My mind is a fucking mess. I decided that each week, I would find a different project to tackle and slowly get my apartment, life, and mind organized. I believe this crisis will be over once I accomplish that. 

I know that’s not the reality, but that’s what I tell myself. However, I do believe this crisis that we are going through has a deeper purpose and meaning that some people may be overlooking. I believe this quarantine time is meant for us to figure out what is really important in life. I don’t think that everything we thought was important before quarantine is anywhere near as important as we believed. For example, I don’t think sports are as important as it once was. I don’t care that sports have returned. I honestly don’t care if it goes away and never comes back. There are so many other things more important in my life than worrying about a rich man’s franchise of overpaid athletes.

 As I mentioned before, I took on projects and one of the projects I decided to tackle was sorting out everything I have ever written in a notepad or on a scrap sheet of paper. As I was going through the three 32-gallon Rubbermaid tubs that were filled to capacity with all my loose papers of everything I’ve ever thought about, I asked myself if I had a problem. I know the number of notepads, journals, and loose sheets of paper I have are not normal. I could probably be on an abbreviated version of the show like Hoarders. If they did a series about people who are slightly organized with all the things they refuse to get rid of, I would be on one of those episodes.

I’m sure I’m a nightmare to be in a relationship with for some people. For one thing, I carry something to write in at all times, just in case I think of anything I feel is worth remembering. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years. I can’t help it. I don’t think there’s always something worth writing down no matter where I go, but you never know. Over the years I haven’t done a great job of organizing all of the thoughts I’ve collected. It started with a few composition books but slowly grew into small milk crates filled with composition books. Then it turned into medium-sized storage containers filled with crates and composition books. Then the composition books morphed into random sheets of papers. Anything with a blank space served as something to write some thoughts on. Now at 44 years of age with a lifetime of ideas and thoughts that have come to me over the years, I find myself about to be overcome by every thought I’ve ever had, literally.

Paper isn’t like storage on your smartphone. When you run out of space on your phone, you can simply purchase more space in the cloud. (Whatever the fuck the cloud is meant to be. I may sound like the old man screaming at the clouds, but I don’t trust technology. I never have, and I never will.) If you want to store more paper, you have to purchase a bigger place to keep the paper. Buying a new place will cost significantly more than purchasing extra space in the cloud.

The other problem that I face is, every time I go to consolidate all these ideas into one journal or notebook, more ideas come to me while I’m transferring my thoughts. I can’t ignore the new thoughts and risk losing them forever. I have to honor the thoughts when they come to me. I don’t want to take for granted that I’ll remember them later. You can see where this is going. Instead of improving my lack of space situation, I make it even worse. Honestly, it’s a vicious fucking cycle. I’m trapped in my mind trying to make sure I don’t let any thoughts that come to me get away.

The other day I made it a point to get rid of all of my papers. With the support of a close friend pushing me and encouraging me all the way, I went through every piece of paper that I had written a thought or idea on since I was in high school. I started off well. I told myself, “Stop being a bitch, Maronzio. You need to do this.”

Yes, I refer to myself as a bitch when I’m trying to motivate myself to do something. I’m aware that this may not be the healthiest way to talk to myself. The problem is, I don’t know how to get help for this. I don’t know how to notify somebody when I’m talking shit to myself in my head. Am I supposed to say, “Hey, you may want to come get me away from myself because I’m talking shit to myself again, and I’m getting fed up with me”? I don’t know how to tell anybody that. I can’t even believe I was able to explain it just now.

I started to have a panic attack on the second day of throwing away papers. I wasn’t just tossing everything out. I had a filing cabinet with labeled files for everything I was able to decipher and decided to keep. In two days, I filled up three 30-gallon trash bags with pieces of papers I didn’t want to keep. A lot of the papers were duplicates of other thoughts that I had already written down. I tend to write down the same thing multiple times. It’s an OCD tic that I have. I was doing well until the end of that day. I started to ask myself why I was having such a hard time throwing away papers that I haven’t looked at in over 20 years.

Sidebar 

“It has been a rough year. I really want to say it’s been a rough life, but I don’t want to be a complete Debbie Downer. I also don’t need anyone dismissing my claim by telling me to get over it. But it has been a rough fucking two or three weeks for me. I’m doing the best I can to write this blog every week and put out my podcast that I’ve been doing inconsistently for the past 12 years. This same inconsistency is why I probably don’t have any endorsements or make any money from it. I don’t have the ability to bullshit people by simply putting out something just because it’s expected of me. What good is creating something if you’re not proud of it? Back to the blog.”

Then I started thinking about my grandmother and how she died from dementia. My grandmother on my mother’s side was my everything. She taught me how to make jelly from scratch. It’s a long process that I hope to be able to duplicate one day. She’s responsible for a good portion of the cooking knowledge I have now. My grandmother was my escape from the world I lived in, where I dealt with parents who were going  through a break-up, female cousins who were trying to have sex with me, and people who used to bully me in school. I loved my grandmother so much that I pretended I enjoyed church just so I could spend more time with her. Fun fact: I did not enjoy church, not one time growing up. I would rather eat at Chipotle once a week for a year than go to church for one Sunday.

I was grateful my grandmother had a sense of humor. She was knowledge, wisdom, and compassion wrapped up in one person. I was my grandmother’s favorite, and the others knew it. The nickname she had given me was the code for the alarm on her home. My grandmother would ask me to come and spend the night at her house. And every time I would say yes. I knew if I went over to my grandmother’s house that we were going to do some sort of interesting old folks’ ritual or cook something. I loved cooking with her. It made me feel grown when she asked me to help her cook.

My grandfather’s passing made it even easier for my mother to accept why I decided to stay with my grandmother when my mother and her new husband bought a home together. I didn’t like my mother’s choice, and anything that I could do to avoid having to share the same home with him was okay in my book.

It hurt when I decided to leave my grandmother in 2001 to move to Los Angeles so that I could pursue my passion. I was dealing with so much then. My only child at the time was three years old. I knew I couldn’t give her the life I wanted her to have if I stayed in North Carolina. It was one of the biggest decisions of my life and still is to this day. The furthest I had ever lived from home was in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I attended my first years of college. I was only two-and-a-half hours away from home if you said fuck the speed limit. It was difficult for me to leave everything I had ever known. I wasn’t so much afraid of leaving, as I was scared at the idea of failing everyone if I wasn’t successful. I think it was even more stressful for me because of my grandmother’s age. I knew I didn’t have that many years left with her when I moved. That’s why it tore me up inside when I learned she had dementia.

My grandmother’s dementia started to show up around 2007, if I’m not mistaken. I wasn’t home when they discovered it. I had to learn it from my mother over the phone. I caught a lump in my throat as she was giving me the news. I had to swallow the fact that I was about to face one of my greatest fears. I was being forced to come to terms with my grandmother’s mortality. I read up on dementia so I could be familiar with what she was going through.

It was hard to watch my grandmother, a person I love, forget who I was as I was holding her hand. I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that this person didn’t have the ability to remember how much she loved me. My grandmother slowly losing her memory was the most painful thing to watch. It was torture to see her fade away, while still having the ability to see her physically. 

There isn’t an instrument big enough to measure how much pain a person is willing to endure for someone they love unconditionally. It would be unfair to do and impossible to create. You can’t measure love. It stretches beyond the universe. Your heart is the only thing that can contain it. I believe that’s why you have to be careful with your heart and when you have the possession of someone else’s heart.

My heart did its best to not break apart as I sat with my grandmother having some version of the same conversation over and over. I wish I were a cellphone picture-taking person. I would’ve taken so many more photos with her than I did. I would rather have had a phone filled with a bunch of videos of my grandmother than videos from the “Kids Getting Hurt” Instagram page (which I save for when I need a good laugh). I yelled at myself when she passed, four days after my birthday in 2011, when I realized I didn’t have enough of her on my phone. Birthdays are hard for me. If you take my fear of death and add my grandmother passing four days later on top of that, you can understand why I don’t look forward to my birthday. I was so angry at myself. I wondered what was the point in having all of this technology if I wasn’t going to do something good with it. I own three or four electronic devices that have the ability to record audio and capture video, but I don’t possess at least a 30 second video of my now deceased grandmother. I’m still disgusted with myself. 

 To this day, I still haven’t cried the way I would have liked to cry when she died. I didn’t cry the way I probably should have so I could get through the grief I was feeling I was too angry at God for taking her from me before I was able to keep my promise of taking her to an Atlanta Braves baseball game. I probably should have been angry with God even earlier than that, like when I found out she had dementia. The window was already closed for me to do anything like that with her by then. I still haven’t attended an Atlanta Braves home game, and I may never have a chance to after this. It was on my to-do list before the pandemic.

Sidebar

“Like so many other people, I thought this year was going to be my year to get what I’ve earned from all of these years of putting in the hard work. My main focus right now is to become a published writer so I can write books. I also want to work on an animated TV show or movie. Disney-Pixar’s Coco is my favorite animated movie since The Incredibles. That movie touched me in a special way. The part where the dead relative doesn’t want to be forgotten is where it touched me the most. I don’t want to be forgotten, and I don’t want to forget. I believe that’s one of the reasons why I write. Back to the blog.”

As I sat going through my jokes and ideas from the past 25 years, I thought about my grandmother and the promise I had made to her. It made me feel like I was giving up on the ideas that I decided to throw away. I felt like some of those ideas had promise, but I knew I would never get to them, and that made me feel like a quitter. I have said time and time again that I am extremely mean to myself.

The other thing that was causing me to have a panic attack about going through these thoughts was the fear that I would forget all these things I’d written down. That was causing me so much discomfort. All I could think about was my grandmother’s battle with dementia. I don’t know if dementia is hereditary. I don’t want to forget everything I have ever thought about. I felt like if I kept all my papers and so happened to develop dementia, I could at least read about who I used to be and how I used to think. I struggled with throwing away all these papers because I felt like I was throwing my memories away. I’m so afraid that I’ll forget everything I’ve ever known, like my grandmother. There’s nothing I can really do about it, if it’s my fate. 

I know I joked about it earlier but I do have difficulty throwing away thoughts that I’ve written down on pieces of paper. Paper is the original hard drive.  I wish there was a way for me to store my memories without being consumed by them. I hope I’m not a hoarder but I probably am to some degree. I need more space. If I can’t hold onto them mentally, I would at least like to be surrounded by my memories physically.

There are several obvious reasons why I’d like to own a home someday. This week, I added another reason: so that I can one day have a place to store all the memories I can’t trust technology to hold on to, just in case I ever forget who I once was.

I may need to go have that long overdue cry now.

- EAT

I write as a form of healing for myself and others. If you enjoyed what you read, “tip the writer” by donating to Venmo or zelle @maronziovance or Cashapp $Gift2MaronzioVance