Déjà Who?

On memory, forgetting, and letting my phone remember for me

I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately. Mostly because mine majorly sucks. But also because I’ve never experienced déjà vu. Not once. People describe that feeling of I’ve been here before or this has happened to me before and I just… haven’t. Ever. For the longest time, I assumed it was one of those exaggerated things people say because they’re dramatic, but it’s actually very real and very common.

I wondered what that said about me. Did my brain skip that feature during installation? Because I am quite an emotional person, who feels most things intensely, so you’d think déjà vu would be right up my alley. But no.

I looked it up and it turns out déjà vu isn’t mystical at all. One theory says it’s a brief overlap between short-term and long-term memory - a tiny glitch where the present accidentally gets processed as the past. Your brain echoes itself and gets confused into thinking “now” is “then.”

Which actually makes sense now because my long-term memory feels like a half-empty hard drive. Big pieces of my childhood are missing. Entire years feel fuzzy. Some memories feel more like stories someone once told me about myself rather than things I actually lived.

And honestly, these days, between Adam, Imad, breastfeeding drama, sleep deprivation, and the general chaos of life, my mind is already working overtime just trying to remember where I put my phone. Experiencing moments once feels ambitious enough. Déjà vu feels like a luxury.

Speaking of my phone, specifically, my phone storage, that’s completely full. So full the rest of the features barely function. The reason? My gallery. 62,675 photos and videos to be exact.

So I finally started backing everything up to free space, and in the process, I stumbled onto entire moments I had forgotten existed. Videos I don’t remember taking. Photos I don’t remember saving. Versions of myself and my life that had inconspicuously slipped out of reach, until the cloud handed them back to me.

And it made me wonder:
Would I have remembered these moments if it weren’t for this?
If I hadn’t needed storage space, would they have stayed buried forever?
And if they had stayed forgotten… would it have mattered?

We talk about memory as something innate we carry inside us. An integral part of our brain. But more and more, it feels outsourced. Stored externally. Backed up. Saved in clouds. Archived in galleries we only open when we’re low on space or low on nostalgia. My brain forgets, but my phone remembers.

Maybe I don’t experience déjà vu because my brain barely saves the first copy. The second copy lives in my camera roll.

Living without a solid archive of memories because of a brain that refuses to store them properly, should make me more present, more rooted in the now. In theory. In reality, I’m still distracted, overstimulated, under-slept, and thinking about twelve things at once. I’m not drifting peacefully through the moment; I’m tumbling through it, trying to grab onto anything that feels meaningful before it disappears, too.

One day, I’ll be cutting fruit or folding laundry or standing in a grocery store and suddenly pause and get that That’s So Raven look (IYKIK) and maybe that tiny flash will feel like proof that my brain still knows how to surprise me.

Until then, I’ll keep living things once. My phone will remember the rest.