Anamnesis
On being found wanting
There is a Greek word I once loved and then forgot. Anamnesis. It comes from the Greek — ana, meaning back, and mnesis, meaning memory. A remembering back. Plato believed that learning was never truly the acquisition of something new. It was the recovery of what the soul already carried. Recognition rather than discovery.
I forgot the word. And then one conversation, at 49 years old, it came back to me. Not because someone taught it to me again. Because the right moment woke it up.
That is how my mind works. It took me nearly half a century to understand that.
I have dyslexia. I know this now with the quiet certainty of someone who has finally been handed the right map after decades of navigating without one. The map does not change the terrain. The difficult ground is still difficult. But suddenly there is a name for why certain paths were always harder than they appeared to be for everyone else.
As a child I could not spell. I could not read easily. Writing was always a labour. The page never came easily. My older sister had a brilliant mind. School came naturally to her in the way that breathing comes naturally. For me there was always preparation. My childhood was structured almost entirely around it. Prepping for dictation. Prepping for spelling tests. Prepping for oral exams, compositions, mock exams. While other children had space to simply be, my days were organized around the next thing I needed to survive.
I remember a spelling test in grade seven. Twenty words a week. The test was never meant to be prepared for. It was designed to reveal what you had naturally absorbed. I got all twenty wrong. The following week I prepared. That was simply what you did. It never occurred to me that the relentless preparation itself was information. That a child who had to work this hard just to reach the starting line that everyone else found themselves at naturally was telling everyone something important. Nobody read it that way. And neither did I.
There was a moment in high school. The teacher called my name and asked me to read my work aloud. I had missed that we were supposed to write something. Without a word my friend slid his poem across to me. He could see I had nothing. I read it one word at a time. Taking an eternity over something small. Nobody acknowledged what was visible to everyone in that room. A girl reading one word at a time. The struggle completely in the open. And still unseen.
I walked out of that class feeling one thing only. Exhausted.
Not humiliated. Not angry. Exhausted. Which is what chronic unacknowledged struggle produces in the end. Not drama. Just a deep bone level tiredness from a lifetime of finding ways through.
The exhaustion followed me. Into a career. Into meeting rooms where I would be speaking and suddenly stop dead. The next word simply gone. Not at the tip of my tongue but vanished entirely, retreated to some far corner I could not reach under pressure. The mind going blank. A full minute of silence. Wanting to end the meeting right there.
I built a professional life around the edges of what I could not do.
There was a moment a couple of years ago. A colleague introduced himself and I could not catch his name. He repeated it twice. I still could not hear it. So I reached for the badge hanging around his neck and read the spelling. And then I could hear it. The written word unlocked the spoken one. My brain needed to see it before it could process the sound.
I thought about that moment afterwards. I wondered if reaching for his badge had seemed strange. Possibly offensive. The social implication arriving late, after the moment had already passed.
That is also how my mind works.
Plato’s anamnesis was about the soul recognizing what it always knew. But there is another dimension to the idea that interests me more now. The things that were always true about us, waiting to be named. The self that existed before she was measured and found wanting.
That girl prepping for dictation at the kitchen table every night, she was not inadequate. She was a person whose particular mind required a different kind of attention than anyone thought to offer her. The intelligence was always there. The curiosity was always there. What was missing was never inside her. Nobody around her knew what they were actually seeing.
I have spent most of my years living with a mind I did not fully understand. Building compensations so habitual they became invisible even to me. Constructing a self image from instruments that were never calibrated for the way I actually work.
And now, in the stillness that follows a life of constant preparation, I am doing something I have never properly done before. Looking back at the terrain. Seeing its shape. Recognizing rather than learning. Remembering back.
Anamnesis.
Exactly when it was supposed to arrive.
