Seizures: there were moments when the world simply disappeared. Not sleep. Not dreams. Not the kind of unconsciousness most people imagine. Just absence.

Transcript

Host:

Tonight, on the Midnight Drive, we’re continuing our stories about time.

A listener submitted this one.

When I was a kid, there were moments when the world simply disappeared.

Not sleep, not dreams.

Not the kind of unconsciousness most people imagine.

Just absence.

A few seconds here, a few moments there.

Entire experiences that belonged to everyone around me,
but somehow never belonged to me.

People could describe what happened.

Doctors could explain it, family members could remember it,
but I could not.

Tonight, we’ll explore childhood seizures, missing memories,
and the strange experience of growing up knowing there are pieces of your own life
you’ll never be able to visit.

Because some mysteries aren’t hidden in old houses or distant places.

Sometimes they’re hidden inside our own history.

In rooms, we’ll never remember entering.

One of the strangest things about memory is that we rarely notice what isn’t there.

We notice what we remember.

A birthday, the first day of school, a family vacation,
a song that takes us back 20 years in an instant.

Memory feels like a collection of moments.

A series of photographs arranged into a story.

And because those photographs are all we have access to,
it’s very easy to assume they’re the whole story.

But sometimes you discover they’re not.

Sometimes you discover there are pages missing.

When I was a kid, I experienced seizures.

Even now, it’s a strange sentence to say.

Not because it isn’t true, but because it describes something
I never actually experienced.

At least not in the way everyone else did.

That’s one of the odd things about childhood seizures.

People often imagine the event itself, the medical side of it,
the concern, the diagnosis, the adults rushing into action.

But as a child, that wasn’t my experience.

My experience was usually the opposite.

My experience was finding out that something had happened.

After it had already happened.

Adults would ask questions.

Someone would tell me to sit down.

Someone would explain that I’d had another seizure.

And I’d find myself trying to understand something
everyone else seemed to know more about than I did.

Imagine being told part of your day existed
and realizing you have no memory of it.

No image, no feeling, no sensation, nothing.

Not darkness, not confusion, just absence, a missing piece.

At first, I don’t think I found that frightening.

Children are remarkably adaptable.

They accept strange things far more easily than adults do.

If adults around you tell you something happened,
you tend to believe them, even when you can’t remember it
for yourself, especially when you
can’t remember it for yourself.

But as I grew older, something about it began to bother me.

Not the seizures, the missing moments, the fact
that there were pieces of my own life I could not access.

Everyone else would tell me what happened.

I was the only person who wasn’t there.

Or at least, that was how it felt.

Family members remembered.

Teachers remembered.

Doctors remembered.

I became a character in stories.

I could not personally verify.

Stories that belonged to me.

Stories that happened to me.

Stories that somehow existed without my participation.

And that creates a strange relationship with memory,
because memory helps us build identity.

When people ask who we are, we often answer with stories.

Things we’ve experienced, places we’ve been,
moments we’ve lived through.

Memory becomes the thread connecting one version
of ourselves to the next.

But what happens when parts of the thread are missing?
As a child, I didn’t have language for that question.

I just knew there were gaps.

Small gaps, brief gaps.

But gaps nonetheless.

Most people move through life assuming
they’re present for their own experiences.

That assumption feels obvious.

Of course we’re present.

Who else would be?
But the older I got, the more interesting
that assumption became, because my childhood contained evidence
that it wasn’t always true.

At least not the way I imagined.

There were moments when life continued.

People spoke.

Rooms existed.

Time passed.

And yet awareness seemed absent.

The world kept moving.

I simply wasn’t there to witness part of it.

Or perhaps more accurately, I wasn’t there to remember it.

Even now, I’m not entirely sure which possibility
feels stranger.

The memory is gone, or the experience itself.

As a child, I spent a lot of time
wondering what happened during those missing moments.

Not because I expected answers, but because mystery naturally
attracts curiosity.

What did it feel like?
What did I see?
Was there anything there at all?
Questions like that don’t have satisfying answers,
especially when the evidence has disappeared.

It’s difficult to investigate a place you can’t visit,
a room that no longer exists, a moment that left no trace
behind.

Eventually, I stopped wondering about the seizures themselves,
or at least I stopped wondering as often.

Something else began to interest me instead.

The places around them, the places between them.

Because life wasn’t made entirely of missing moments,
it was made mostly of ordinary moments.

School days, summer afternoons, conversations, road trips,
family dinners, the everyday experiences that
quietly became a childhood.

And yet, those ordinary moments seemed different
once I knew gaps were possible.

The certainty most people have about memory
began to feel fragile.

Because I’d already learned something many people
don’t learn until much later.

It’s this.

Awareness is not guaranteed.

That memory is not complete.

That even our own lives can contain territory
we’ve never truly explored.

And maybe that’s why stories about lost time
have always fascinated me.

It’s not because they’re unusual.

Well, the story about the woman driving into the haze,
losing 90 minutes, and then ending up
miles away at their car point in the opposite direction.

That’s pretty unusual.

But most lost time stories are not that unusual.

It’s because they feel familiar,
more like the story about the man that misplaced everything.

Think about it.

A missing hour.

A forgotten afternoon.

A blank page in an otherwise complete story.

I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by a blank page
I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by those ideas.

Long before I had names for them.

Long before I understood them.

Long before I realized they would continue following me
into adulthood.

Because eventually I discovered something unexpected.

The mystery wasn’t the seizures.

The mystery was what they revealed.

That there are missing rooms inside of all of us.

And sooner or later.

Sooner or later, we all find ourselves
standing outside one of them.

We’ll be right back.

You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

Now, when I was younger, I thought the mystery
was the seizure itself.

The missing moment.

The blank space.

The piece of experience that I could not recover.

That seemed like the obvious question.

What happened?
What was it like?
What existed inside the gap?
But the older I get, the less interested
I become in those questions.

Not because they aren’t interesting.

Because I’ve become fascinated by a different one.

What happens after?
What happens when you grow up knowing
there are pieces of your own story
that you’ll never have access to?
Most of us imagine memory as something permanent.

Maybe imperfect, maybe incomplete, but permanent.

A storage system.

An archive.

A place where experiences wait patiently until we need them.

Then life teaches us otherwise.

A face disappears.

A name fades.

A conversation becomes impossible to reconstruct.

Entire years become strangely difficult to access.

The older we get, the more evidence
we accumulate that memory is not a vault.

It’s a survivor.

It carries what it can, and it lets other things go.

And perhaps that’s true for all of us.

The difference is that some of us discover it earlier.

As a child, I knew there were missing pieces.

Not because someone explained a theory,
but because I lived with the evidence.

There were moments everyone else could describe
that I could not.

Moments that belonged to my life,
but I didn’t have any memory.

And for a long time, that felt very unusual.

Then I realized something.

Every human being lives with missing pieces.

Ask somebody about their second birthday.

Ask them about an ordinary afternoon
when they were four years old.

Ask them what happened on a random Tuesday 15 years ago.

Most of life disappears.

Not because it wasn’t important, but because memory was never
designed to preserve everything.

It couldn’t.

The sheer volume would be impossible.

Instead, memory seems to preserve meaning, emotion,
change, moments that somehow stand apart.

The rest slowly dissolves into the background.

That’s not a flaw.

It’s part of being a human being.

Still, there’s something unsettling about it, though,
isn’t there?
Because we build our identities from memories.

We tell stories about who we are, where we’ve been,
what shaped us.

Yet those stories are assembled from fragments,
a few photographs, a handful of vivid moments,
pieces that survived while countless others quietly
disappeared.

In other words, we’re all constructing ourselves
from incomplete information.

Somehow, somehow, it works.

Not despite the missing pieces, alongside them.

That realization changed the way I
think about those childhood gaps.

I used to imagine them as empty spaces.

Now, I’m not so sure.

Because even though I can’t remember those moments,
they still belong to my life.

They still influence the person I became.

They still exist somewhere in the chain of events
that led to this moment.

I simply cannot access them.

Which raises an interesting possibility.

Perhaps the most important parts of our lives
aren’t always the parts that we remember.

Perhaps some experiences continue shaping us
long after they’ve disappeared from conscious reach.

A lesson learned.

A kindness received.

A fear overcome.

A moment of wonder.

A moment of grief.

Not every influence remains visible.

Not every cause leaves fingerprints.

Yet, the effect remains.

Maybe that’s true of all time.

Not just the lost moments.

All time.

Think about the people you’ve loved.

Most of your time with them is gone.

Not emotionally.

Literally.

The conversations, the car rides,
the ordinary evenings, the jokes, the pauses.

Most of it has vanished into the past.

And yet, those moments continue living inside of you.

Not as memories.

As consequences.

As influence.

As part of who you are.

Maybe that’s why I’ve stopped thinking
about memory as a record.

Started thinking about it as a shoreline.

The visible edge of something much larger beneath the surface
exists an entire landscape we rarely see.

Forgotten days.

Lost moments.

Experiences beyond recall.

The vast majority of a life.

The shoreline is real, but it isn’t the whole ocean.

The older I get, the more comforting I find that idea.

Not frightening.

Comforting.

Because it means our lives are larger than our memories.

Larger than the stories we tell.

Larger than the pieces we can retrieve.

Somewhere behind every remembered moment
stand thousands we no longer have access to.

What a bizarre thing to think about.

And yet, those memories remain part of us.

The boy who experienced those seizures
spent years wondering about the missing rooms.

Wondering what was hidden behind the doors.

Wondering what happened inside spaces he could never enter.

Now, I think the mystery is something else.

Not what was lost, but what remained.

Because those moments are gone.

The memories are gone.

The experience may be gone.

But somehow, the person remains.

Carrying traces of places he can no longer visit.

And maybe that’s true for all of us.

Maybe every life is partly remembered and partly unknown.

A story assembled from fragments.

A map with missing territory.

A journey that contains roads we no longer recognize.

And yet, somehow, we can keep moving forward.

Carrying more of the past than we realize.

Even when we can’t remember where we found it.