The elegantly named “water football catch” was my favorite pool-related activity throughout all of elementary school. The idea is simple: my dad throws the ball while I jump and attempt to catch it. Sometimes other people would play, too, and whenever possible I would play against my relatives. 

One summer at my grandparents’ pool I was locked into a heated game of water football catch against my dad. Being a mouthy 9-year-old who was somehow beating my extended family, I began using the term “butterfingers.” Every time the word left my lips,  I made sure to explain that butterfingers meant that my family members’ fingers were made of butter, hence why they couldn’t catch like me. I was undefeated, and I made sure everyone knew it. Of course, it was an unnecessary explanation, but kids just do things like that. 

High on my water football catch victory, I was wandering around my grandparents’ dusty house when I heard my parents speaking, my dad’s voice tainted with annoyance. Intrigued, I sat outside of the locked kitchen door, trying to catch the words being muttered on the other side.

“I just don’t understand why he kept repeating what butterfingers mean. “No shit they’re made of butter, that’s what butterfingers means.”

This is my most powerful memory of embarrassment.

How did my brain pick this moment? This wasn’t the first time I was embarrassed. Yet, like a pin ceaselessly poking my brain, I can’t seem to erase the memory. 

In third grade, there was a new kid in my school. His name was Andres, and he was a class clown in all respects. And, like most class clowns, people didn’t like him very much. Every day he was verbally abused by my classmates, and eventually, I joined in too. I didn’t think it was bullying at the time, because in my third-grade brain, it seemed logical that annoying people needed to be insulted in order to learn how to be like everyone else. 

I wasn’t kind to Andres. Some days I would take his pencils, make fun of his shoes, and I insulted everything he did that I deemed “annoying”. One day during a game of 4 square, he finally snapped. He had tears in his eyes, and I stood there shocked while his happy facade slid away and onto the floor. His voice was low, and he stared at the ground.

“I feel like you’re nice Ian. Why are you so mean to me?”

This is my most powerful memory of shame.

I never told my parents, because that remains one of the most powerful experiences I have ever felt: red hot disgust. I wanted to cry with Andres. My pulse pounded in my ears and my chin quivered as I looked him in his eyes. I don’t remember what I said to him afterwards. 

In the 9th grade, I read the novel Catcher in the Rye. I had put off finishing the book earlier in my first semester, so I had no choice but to read it during my family road trip. I slowly worked my way through the novel, somewhat skeptical as to why anyone would read about some kid named “Holden Caulfield.” 

Yet, for whatever reason, I related to one aspect of Holden Caulfield’s litany of problems: he was lost. I knew my life was not over, and Holden Caulfield’s problems were far worse than my own, but I related to his fear. I felt empathy, and I reflected on my own life. 

“I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

(For the record, I hate Holden Caulfield.)

I sat, near sobbing and holding back tears, as I stared out for miles into the open desert. The car was silent as I sat with a pit in my stomach. I was scared. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt fear or a lack of direction, but in that moment the true gravity of my feelings hit me. My brain provided me with a new feeling of despair I’ve rarely felt since. I couldn’t stop thinking about what my purpose was. Usually introspection is a thought process, where one evaluates their own life. But in that car ride introspection was a feeling, not a reflection.

This is my most powerful memory of introspection. 

These memories exist indefinitely in my head, their impact infinite. Each time they’re recalled, I’m thrown into a feedback loop — every time I feel these emotions I return to the first time I experienced them. When I feel self-conscious my fingers turn into butter, when I am ashamed, I feel Andres’s despair, and when I reflect on my own life some cocky kid named Holden Caulfield fills my shoes. 

Yet, these memories are so small. They aren’t the most embarrassing or shameful things I’ve ever done. Even at that young age, there were certainly other moments where I had felt those emotions in some form. Still, my brain decided to let those moments fade farther into my memory and bring these ones forward.

It feels arbitrary and random. But I know it isn’t. Why did my brain pick these moments? 

There have been centuries of work spent trying to understand the human brain. Scientists can now track its patterns down to the atom, and map out extensive processes for how we feel emotions. 

Nevertheless, there is something science can’t explain.

One would think the brain would remember the most important moments in our lives the most clearly, but that doesn’t seem to be true. Instead, it seems almost arbitrary how our brain chemistry dictates what leaves lasting impressions on us. 

The brain might start with chemical reactions, but that doesn’t mean everything in our heads can be explained away via a periodic table. 

There are always different ways to understand the world, and sometimes, some things can’t be understood. 

They just have to be accepted.