#10 The fear of being forgotten
not after death, but like right now, anytime
It’s a Sunday morning and I am listening to music while making myself bread-butter and coffee, thinking it’s a good life, while the washing machine has run into an error for the fifth time in the last thirty minutes. Sigh.
It takes a lot of active ‘I have to do this’ to actually be sane while doing it all, when most of your energy is going into firefighting and all your favourite hugs are at least 20 Bangalore kilometres away. But all that growing up aside, today, I want to talk about irrational fears.
On irrational fears
Firstly, anyone who knows me knows I am scared out of my wits by lizards. And last week, I had to deal with one on my own. I will paint the image for you briefly. Earlier Wednesday, the first thing I encountered in my house when I woke up was a baby lizard on the FLOOR. I somehow ended up killing it, trust me, I am not proud, but in that moment, only one of us could live.
The point is that all my life, people have told me things like “the lizard is so tiny, you’re so huge”, “it can’t hurt you”, or “it’s scared of you, it will not do anything”, etc., you get it? But all of these words really don’t help me, because if I could make sense of them, I would’ve done it the first time I heard them. Anyway, I think getting rid of that dead lizard is one of the top ten bravest moments of my life. (Yes, on the same list as moving cities and living alone.)
Next, onto more real, or mature, or emotional fears - I fear that everyone I love is going to forget me, at some point. I know, trust me, it sounds irrational to me as I type it. But hey, a bot on Quora1 says “Fearing being forgotten is a common and deeply human concern,” and someone called Sean validates it by saying “It is as natural a fear as it can be.”
I do think it has an underlying connotation of passively thinking about death and its aftermath. A lot of other people think of being forgotten all the time, just in the context of being forgotten after they die. There’s even a term for it: Athazagoraphobia; the intense, irrational fear of being forgotten or forgetting.
The only difference with me is that I think I will be forgotten, at some point, on a random day, by someone I love/ care about. (No, you cannot call me out on my attachment issues.)
Forgotten, how I perceive it, is to NOT be missed anymore. And as a person, I am always, at all times, missing someone, something, some feeling. In fact, I have never felt any quote deeper than John Green’s, ‘to be alive is to be missing’.
But literature highlights that there can be different sides to it, being forgotten to some might not just be a fear but a real feeling akin to loneliness, isolation, being lost or felt in the larger scheme of things, as the aftermath of conflict, in a state of refuge or displacement.2
Disclaimer: This will confuse you. Is this fear directly related to having a sense of belongingness? I fail to understand how being forgotten would come into play if you don’t feel significant in the first place? Or is it exactly why it would come into play? I am also confused.
Back to the original thought. Thankfully, I have always had people around me who have made me feel seen, heard, considered and loved. So recently, in changing jobs and houses and meeting new people, I have really felt the need to be reassured against my borderline stubborn belief that people who have known me for less than a year, will just forget me, or I will keep becoming less and less significant in their lives or just completely redundant at one point. On one hand, this has wired me in a way that I always put in an effort to be present, which could be a great thing, maybe. But the fear persists.
This has only made sense in psychology and has merit in relatability. As Jonas says, “Those closest to us, our friends and family, are the ones who remember us the most. If there is a lack of attention, it can cause anxiety about being abandoned, forgotten, or neglected. When there's no one left in the living world who remembers you, we could call it the final death since you've disappeared from everyone's mind.”3 It’s not that intense for me, though.
Reading, to better dissect my thoughts, often leads me to discover unexplored perspectives and real-world implications on thoughts that I initially believed were an anxious figment of my brain. The number of Medium blog posts I’ve read around this makes me feel like it’s a more common thought than I could’ve anticipated. Most people on Reddit call this a ‘profoundly relatable sentiment’, what do you think?
Great links to check out:
Sam Baker’s Recommendations
Jeannine Ouellette writes a thread of poems that I really love
Let Adam Mastroianni convince you why your brain needs a boxcutter
Another poem I loved reading: Ghazal for Longing by Sarah Mills
For visceral relief
I have had a few mindbending thoughts in the last few weeks; a few belong here, some in my notes app and some in the trash can. Thank you for supporting my little writing endeavour.
I hope you write to me about your irrational fears, too!
Until next time,
Ishika <3
🫂🫂❤️🩹