Issue 83: Fact-Check Friday: Memory is Not a Moral Issue
What memory is and how Step Four is a psychological gift.
In This Issue
Recent Issues
Fact-Check Friday: Memory is Not a Moral Issue
Food for Thought: The Mother of Invention
Updates:
New on the Marsh Press Etsy Store
Fat & Drunk Entries
Recent Issues
Terminology Tuesday: Attribution and Scapegoating the World Cup Loss
In this issue, Terminology Tuesday looks at the USMNT's World Cup loss through the lens of Attribution Theory and scapegoating, exploring how the president's interference created an ethical cloud that may have genuinely rattled the team's psychology. It connects this to how neural pathways prioritize familiar, fast explanations over accuracy whenever uncertainty feels threatening.Fact-Check Friday: Introjection Revisited
In this issue, I backpedaled on Tuesday's discussion about introjection to remind us that not every borrowed voice in our heads is a threat. While we do unconsciously absorb harmful beliefs from those who shamed or controlled us, we also take in the deep care, steadiness, and kindness of the people who have supported us.
Fact-Check Friday: Memory Is Not a Moral Issue
On Wednesday, I was texting with Rachel and Sherry about the day I quit drinking. I had just published my memoir piece about that day, and both of them had played significant roles in it, so before the piece traveled any farther, I wanted them to know. But I was also curious. After all these years, I wanted to know what they remembered. What followed turned into one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about memory in a long time.
Three Bottles of Wine
Rachel shared a detail that immediately caught my attention: She remembered being shocked to hear me tell the doctor that the night before, I’d had three bottles of wine. Three bottles of wine. That stopped me, though not because the amount seemed impossible—strangely, the amount didn’t faze me at all. What fascinated me was the wine itself. My memory of that period centers on vanilla vodka. In my recollection, that was my drink. So hearing Rachel’s memory left me with questions I genuinely cannot answer. Was I actually drinking three bottles of wine the night before? Was I drinking vodka but telling the doctor it was wine? Was I unconsciously substituting one alcohol for another because it somehow sounded less awful while still conveying the severity of what had landed me in the emergency room? I don’t know. And that’s the point. The memory doesn’t resolve the mystery. It reveals one.
What Sherry Remembered
Sherry’s account filled in details that completely changed my understanding of that day. She’d just put her son down for his nap—he was about a year and a half old—when I called and told her I thought I was dying and asked her to bring me to the emergency room. She wanted to call 911; I refused and said I’d meet her down in the parking lot. So she loaded her son into the car, drove to my building, and got me to Methodist herself. Rachel met them in the waiting room. They sat with me for a long stretch before Sherry’s husband, Matt, arrived to take their son home, and even then Sherry stayed until she physically had to leave to pump. She told me she’d carried a quiet guilt ever since—not that she and Rachel hadn’t seen what was happening, but that they hadn’t understood how deep it went.
Reading her account, I realized I had forgotten—or perhaps never fully understood—the context surrounding my own emergency. Sherry wasn’t simply a friend who rushed me to the hospital; she was nursing and caring for a toddler while doing it. Rachel was pregnant with her second child, which changes my recollection that one of them was pregnant, the other had a kid. Somehow, over the years, I had flattened those details out of the story. I didn’t do that intentionally, and it wasn’t because they weren’t important, but simply because memory doesn’t preserve everything equally. The central drama of the day—my drinking, my fear, the emergency room—stayed in focus, while the realities surrounding everyone else went blurry.
Part of me could have met these discoveries with embarrassment, wondering how I could not have known or remembered. Chastising myself, feeling more shame. But mostly I felt grateful: Grateful that they remembered, grateful that they told me, grateful that after all these years, the story became larger rather than smaller.
The Moralization of Memory
We tend to think of memory as a moral issue. If something was important, we should remember it accurately. If someone helped us, we should remember every detail. If we care enough, surely our recollection should be complete. But memory doesn’t work that way, and it’s worth understanding why. Memory wasn’t built to function like a filing cabinet, storing paper untouched until we pull it back out. Researchers who study how memory forms increasingly think the brain didn’t evolve to keep a perfect record of the past—it evolved to help us predict what’s coming next, using whatever fragments of experience are useful for that job. Every time we recall something, we’re not replaying a tape; we’re rebuilding it on the spot, out of whatever pieces are still available.
We talked about this back during reunion season, about how the reubuilding is reconsolidation. Reconsolidation is how a memory, once reactivated, briefly goes soft again before it resettles, and in that soft window, new information can get folded in. So when Rachel mentioned the wine and Sherry described that day from inside her own experience, they weren’t correcting me. They were handing me new material while the memory was still open enough to take it. It isn’t a courtroom transcript. It isn’t an objective archive. It’s a living reconstruction, assembled again each time we revisit it, with some pieces vivid, others faded, and some belonging to someone else’s version of the story entirely. It’s a human issue rather than a moral issue.
Remapping The Pathway
This is where the remapping actually happens. A memory that stays untouched in the vault, replayed the same way every time, keeps its original neural groove worn deep and unchanged. But a memory that gets reactivated, questioned, and layered with new information has to physically restabilize afterward—the pathway gets laid down again, slightly different than before, carrying the new context along with it. That’s not a metaphor. It’s closer to how the brain actually works.
And it means the emotional charge attached to a memory isn’t fixed either; it can loosen, shift, or soften as the memory itself gets rebuilt. The more curious I can stay about what I don’t remember or got wrong, the more that window stays open for revision. The more punitive I am with myself for the gaps, the more I tend to shut the memory back down before anything new can get in. Even though every time a therapist told me to “stay curious” I wanted to punch a wall, it’s more than just something to get me to stop going off on a rumination or judgment. It’s functionally what allows the rebuilding to happen at all. Shame closes the door. Curiosity holds it open.
What The Steps Understand
This experience made me think about the Twelve Steps, particularly Step Four. People often describe Step Four as the step where we write down our resentments—a list of the people who harmed us, disappointed us, frightened us, or left lasting marks on our lives. It’s easy to see that exercise as a catalog of grievances a la “Seinfeld,” but that’s never been the real point. The real point is to examine memory itself. We take experiences that have been living inside us, sometimes for decades, and place them on paper where we can actually look at them—who was involved, what happened, how it affected me, what my role was in it, what fears attached themselves to it, what kept me returning to it over and over.
Put in those terms, Step Four is essentially doing on purpose what Wednesday’s text conversation did to me by accident. Writing a memory down pulls it out of storage and back into that changeable state; sitting with it, turning it over, comparing it against other people’s versions, is what lets the brain actually update it rather than just replay it. Memory isn't truth, and it isn't objective—Step Four works with that reality instead of against it, using the act of writing to reveal the role a memory plays in our lives and to give the pathway a chance to build rather than stay stuck.
The Gift of Other People’s Memories
The older I get, the more convinced I become that no significant event belongs entirely to one person. The day I quit drinking belongs to me, but it also belongs to Rachel, to Sherry, to Matt, and in some small way even to a toddler who spent part of that day accompanying his mother to an emergency room. My memory contains one version. Theirs contain others. Put together, those memories create something richer than any single account could provide, and that’s what felt so meaningful about those text conversations on Wednesday. I wasn’t fact-checking a story. I was expanding it.
But not every gap gets received that easily. I’ve had moments where a friend mentioned something from my drinking years that I had no memory of at all, and the shame that came with it was sharper than almost anything else in early recovery. Not shame about the drinking itself—by then I’d made a kind of peace with that. Shame about the not-knowing. Someone else had a piece of my own life that I didn’t have access to, and for a long time my instinct was to file that away as further proof of how far gone I’d been, another mark against me.
It took real work to move that reaction out of the dark and into something closer to curiosity—to sit with a missing memory and ask what it might mean instead of treating it as a verdict. That shift didn’t happen once. It happened slowly, one remapped moment at a time, until hearing something I’d forgotten stopped feeling like an indictment and started feeling like what it actually was: Someone handing me back a piece of myself I couldn’t retrieve on my own.
If you’re early in recovery and this kind of excavation is starting to feel tempting, a quick word of caution: Go slow. Digging into missing or fragmented memories can surface more than you expect, and doing it without support can knock you sideways at exactly the point when your footing is still new. Cope ahead before you go looking. Know who you’ll call if something surfaces that you weren’t prepared for, and have a therapist, sponsor, or trusted friend in place before you start pulling threads, not after. This kind of memory work is valuable, but it’s not a solo sport, especially not this early.
The Real Fact-Check
The fact-check this week is simple: Memory is not a moral issue. Its purpose is not to establish permanent verdicts about ourselves or other people—its value lies in helping us learn, understand, and grow. Sometimes that means writing memories down, as we do in recovery work. Sometimes it means sharing them with trusted people. Sometimes it means discovering that what we remember is only part of what happened. When Rachel told me about the wine, I was left with questions. When Sherry described the day from her perspective, I was given context I didn’t know I was missing. Neither conversation made my memory less valuable. They made it more complete. And perhaps that’s the real gift of both memory and recovery—not certainty, but curiosity. The willingness to say, “This is what I remember.” And then ask, “What do you remember?”
Food for Thought
The Mother of Invention
“Necessity is the mother of invention” has always struck me as one of those phrases that quietly holds more truth than we give it credit for—especially if we pay attention to its gendered core instead of skimming past it. We toss it around as if it simply means “pressure creates solutions,” but there’s something else humming underneath: the idea that invention is born out of need, not out of pure genius or heroics. Need is often invisible, domestic, unpaid, uncelebrated—historically coded as feminine. In that sense, “mother of invention” might be one of the few idioms where the gendered metaphor is actually on the nose.
I’m not a mother or a father, so on its face the phrase excludes me, at least in the literal sense. And yet, for the sake of what it’s pointing to, I’m willing to go with it. There’s a kind of borrowed truth here: Even if I don’t occupy the parent role, I recognize that necessity—the conditions of care, scarcity, and survival—is what has forced me, and so many others, to invent new ways of living.
If “necessity is the mother of invention,” then invention isn’t just a lone genius in a lab; it’s the person who has to make dinner from nothing, the caregiver who figures out how to stretch medication or time or patience, the marginalized thinker who builds workarounds for systems not designed for them. The impulse to invent doesn’t arise from comfort; it arises from “this cannot go on like this,” from the quiet crisis of making life workable when the default options have failed.
Which makes me wonder: Maybe this is one gender nod that should have gotten more traction, not less. We’ve rightfully started to question why so many metaphors are gendered at all, but here is one where the “mother” isn’t ornamental. It acknowledges—if only accidentally—that the conditions that force innovation are often those of care, constraint, and survival. It nods toward the reality that much of what changes the world doesn’t begin on a battlefield or a boardroom table, but in a kitchen, a sickroom, a classroom, a support group, a mind quietly trying to figure out how to keep going.
Maybe “necessity is the mother of invention” reminds us that our most important breakthroughs grow out of discomfort, scarcity, and misfit realities—and that the people most acquainted with those states have been, historically, those whose labor and creativity we least credit. In that frame, the phrase becomes less about a clever proverb and more about an invitation to notice who is doing the inventing when things are impossible, and to ask whether we’re willing to honor the “mother” rather than just praise the invention.
Updates
New in the Marsh Press Etsy Store:
Mothers are on my mind lately—maybe it’s the ones I talk about above, maybe it’s my own that I’ll talk about next week, maybe it’s “necessity is the mother of invention.” And now it’s also this t-shirt. I’ve added new designs to the Marsh Press store featuring a sparrow and the phrases “Sober Single Mom Energy” and “Sober Mom Energy.” Sparrows have become an important symbol I associate with mothers: elegant, purpose-built, fierce, persistent, and present even when the world doesn’t notice. I also made sure to choose colors and sizes that run from XS up to 5X, because there’s no gatekeeping this energy—sober mom strength belongs on every kind of body. Even if the models of the mockups aren’t inclusive, the tees are.
These tees are a quiet, wearable nod to the power of sober motherhood, the resilience it takes, and the everyday flight path of women who keep showing up.
On the Serial Memoir: Fat & Drunk
Become a paid subscriber to read the next installment of my episodic memoir, Fat & Drunk. The subscription gives you access to all previous episodes:
Start at the beginning: The prologue to Fat & Drunk.
Wrong explores the paralyzing obsession of disordered eating and the deep-seated belief that I am fundamentally wrong. It captures the frantic, secretive compulsion of a binge—chasing a temporary relief that serves as the perfect psychological prelude to my history with alcohol.
The Day I Was Dying details what happened on September 18, 2009. I was alone in my apartment, convinced my body had finally caught up with every bad choice I’d made. It’s a story about obsession and compulsion. And redemption.
It made me an obsessive ruminator crazy trying over and over to get the memory just right, to be an exact mental replica. I have had to accept that these memories are constantly changing and evolving because I came to believe only the present exists while the past is a dream. It is no more real these memories than the dream of flying or of Bernie Sanders defeating Hilary in 2016. Memories as moral matters might affect how you approach amends going through the steps. We see even in the beginning of the story we’ve formed from past events how our need to ask for fogiveness can be distored by our lack of or overabundance of how we the addict created the situation that warrants forgiveness. It’s why a good sponsor is really important so they can help you avoid getting swept up on too many details when you need to focus on the feelings and the hurt more than trying to recreate a polariod of a day when your using and abusing affected those you wronged or hurt. They dont need you to recite the details but they need to hear you acknowledge their trauma or hurt from the using behavior. Amends to me is when the magic of recovery really raises to a higher spiritual existence.