Let me tell you about the time I lost my mind.

To tell you the truth, it happens all the time. My highly successful selective amnesia has erased the painful peaks of heartbreak, childbirth, and too many martinis, leaving only benign flatlands that are much easier to navigate.

Multiple times a day, it also removes my words. Or at least the memory of my words. It’s even more than those instances, often dubbed ‘senior moments’, where I lose my train of thought, or can’t access the word I want to say. This is much more serious.

I learned early on that it was important for me to clearly mark my writing, or I would come back to it, sometimes only days later, and not remember that I had written it. I would then need to search the internet to see if it belonged to someone else and I had acquired it to read or share. Often, I could come to no clear conclusion, and the piece would be lost to my little part of the world. This was too painful to encounter, again and again, so I forced myself into this small discipline of a single line at the bottom: I wrote this.

Words are important to me, as you might imagine. I consider language a beloved friend. (Weird, I know.)

I know that my words love me. Maybe because I love them even more. I forget them in the same way that I forget how beautiful my daughter is, so that every time I see her, it puts a catch in my breath.

Sometimes my words come back to me from the mouths of others, like meeting a stranger whose face you think you remember.

That’s so clever. Who said that, I’ll ask.

You did, they will say with a mix of humor and concern for my sanity.

I would say it’s embarrassing, but I made a choice not to take that on. There are much better things to be embarrassed about than a momentary absence of recognition.

Perhaps I forget what I’ve written or said so I can return to it objectively, although that almost never happens. When I see my darlings again, I find them extraordinary. There is no objectivity there, just blind infatuation.

Why is it that way, I wonder? And is it that way for others?

What I hear from the seekers, creatives, and high-achievers I work with, is that their process is less like forgetting and infatuation, and more like judgment and abandonment. These words are no good, their inner critic says. Don’t let them out, they insist.

This is a different sort of delusion, I think. A different category of mind virus than mine. One where the gremlins have taken the heart hostage and hypnotized it into sullying its truth.

Words are a miracle. Language is a miracle. The fact that we can create impenetrable beauty by making black marks on a page is nothing less than the work of the divine beings taking residence in our fleshly packaging.

Miracles stop showing themselves to us (but continue happening, by the way) when we diminish their appearance or their importance. To look at a thought taken form in words on a page (or notes on a staff, or colors on a canvas, for that matter) and not decree it a sacred act, is to not fully appreciate what’s happening.

Here’s my theory on the mystery:

My amnesia keeps me from falling into this trap, from catching this widespread virus that veils the miracle of making art. It helps me to see, with new eyes, the love that imbues this work, even the clumsy sentences and awkward ideas. Perhaps the only way to keep me remembering… is to make me forget.

What part of YOUR life can benefit from a sprinkling of forgetfulness?

P.S. There may also be an element of too many recreational activities in my youth, but my vote is for divine intervention.