Subin Lee / Memory Chain / Thursday 1-3pm

How Mind Protects Us By Forgetting

 

They say that your mind protects you by forgetting things that can be harmful to you. I didn't realize that it was true until an experience I had in 2010.

 

It was in my second year of middle school, when I got the biggest scar I have on by body. We were on a school trip. As it was the time in middle school that we got to sleep somewhere else, everybody was super excited. It was the same for me and my friends, too.

We all enjoyed our first day of the trip. At night, the teachers instructed the students to go to bed immediately, without playing all night. But as you can guess, we didn't listen. My friends and I were wide awake; we were ready to have some fun. After playing Truth or Dare and several rounds of other games, we decided to play statues(red light green light; Korean name for this play is 무궁화 꽃이 피었습니다) in our room. The room wasn't quite big enough, but it didn't seem to matter to us. At least, that's what we thought.

 

We chose who will be 'it', and the rest of us waited in a room across from 'it'. Because the room was quite small, the game went on quickly. It was just in a few seconds' time when the first one ahead touched 'it', and everyone ran rushing backwards. This is where a piece of my memory is gone missing. I thought I had run, but in a blink of an eye, I was suddenly down on the ground and my friends were screaming. I couldn't understand why they were all crying, until I slowly realized that blood was coming out of my right knee. It didn't take so long till I figured out what had happened. A glass sliding door between the two rooms had been broken; I had crashed into the glass door. It was a complete chaos, with blood all over the floor, friends crying, teachers running into the room. The ambulance came, and I got stitched in the emergency room. My parents drove all the way to pick me up in the middle of the night, and I ended up being the only student who came back on the very first day of our first school trip. Not to mention a scar on my right leg.

 

You can say that I was extremely surprised in that situation. I was dumbfounded, because for me, the whole thing happened out of nowhere. It was just like in the movies, where they have the quick, sudden screen change between the scenes. I believe that it is because my mind worked to protect me from the sudden shock. It worked pretty well, since I don't remember anything in that short moment, including any pain. It might be possible that my friends' minds worked, too; no one seemed to remember what had exactly happened. Their minds could have decided to protect them from the impact of seeing a shocking sight that they had never seen before.

 

Well, thanks to my protective mind I had to make up an explanation of what had happened. I lied to my teachers and parents about that I had slipped from stepping on an open suitcase. But no one got hurt from my lies after all; literally, I am the only one who had been hurt.

Since this unusual, odd experience I believe that our minds work in a way to achieve what's best for us; to protect us from harmful memories which can leave us with a trauma. I honestly thank myself, or should I say my mind, for doing so. I can guarantee that yours will do too if you are ever in a situation that can give you a baleful impact. But please don't risk anything to test this; your mind deserves better!

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201502398 Subin Lee