The blank I drew with my grandfather is just an example of what you might call a “memory void.” It’s not that I tend to forget people. Indeed, my loved ones are safe in my mind, albeit in that intangible and elusive form, with no risk of being forgotten—more on this later. My memory voids are specifically about the concrete things I did in my life.
Ask me how my childhood was, or if I had fun in my twenties, and all I can answer is “I think so.” Not because I wasn’t sure about it at the time, but because I don’t remember what I thought of it. With such broad and general questions, I have almost no hope of coming up with representative memories to help me answer those questions. No flashbacks to times I thought “this is great!” nor to moments of sadness. Again, many such events are buried as facts and observations somewhere in my memory, but that’s not how I can recover them.
My past feels like someone else’s. I know a great deal about it, more than anyone else in fact, yet I don’t remember being in it. I can create a year-by-year history of my whole life with information such as the places I lived in, the schools I went to, the major turning points in my life; I can explain many facts about the key people and events of each time period; I can even arrange many of these in the form of stories or ordered stages of growth—yet none of this feels like things I did. It’s like being the world’s top expert about a stranger’s life.
Yeah this sounds more like SDAM. Here is another self-description blog post of SDAM (via Hacker News).