What happens to a memory deferred?

(Warning: This entry contains serious quantities of navel-gazing. If you want to cut to the chase, skip down to the bottom.)

This summer, especially in Munich, I was more alone than ever in my life. In the twenty years since learning to talk, I’ve grown accustomed to telling at least one person about events in my life each day. Sometimes the main purpose in talking is to stay close to those people. Other times, it’s an important way for me to process what has occurred. In France, for example, I came to value my friendships with Americans because we drew conclusions together about differences between US and French culture. They could tell me, for example, whether something about my host family was typical in theirs as well, or whether something I’d never seen in the US actually existed there.

I missed that in Munich. There were no Americans sharing my experiences, and other foreigners were surprised by different aspects of German culture. My infrequent e-mails and phone calls home weren’t nearly enough to describe half of the events that had puzzled, delighted, or irritated me. And while I sometimes asked Germans about phenomena I had noticed, much more went unsaid. Journaling helped me keep track a bit, but much remained merely an internal monologue.

Now I’m wondering how that affects my memories from this summer. Explaining something to other people demands that I reconstruct the details in a way that emphasizes the aspects that I see as important. This moves me toward a conclusion about the event, whether or not it’s an accurate one, and makes me remember the story in a certain way. With many puzzling events that I never discussed, I wasn’t sure what conclusion to draw, so I never decided anything about them. Now I’ve either forgotten they ever happened or lost too many details to make them worth discussing.

In June and July, I felt as though I was bursting with stories to tell, and it was frustrating to remain silent. Now that I’m in the US, I wonder where these stories went. Some of them seem too insignificant to mention six weeks later. Others seem a bit hazy and hard to describe. Still others come to mind at unexpected times, startling me after lying dormant for months. I think I need to keep processing them in order to learn from them.

The moral of my woeful tale? If you want to do me a favor, ask me about this summer, and wait for me to unfold some good stories! I’ll do my best to make it interesting and/or educational. But you’ll actually help me to grow from my overseas experience. If you want ideas, here are some topics that I haven’t gotten to share much about:

Austrian culture
-differences between my time in Innsbruck and Munich
-importance of Austria and Germany to each other
-why World War II affected Austria and Germany very differently

German culture
-adventures in grocery shopping
-an impromptu sleepover with neighbors I'd never met
-influence of the English language

International culture (with my classmates at the Goethe-Institut)
-life in former Communist countries
-norms for guy-girl interactions
-income disparities