The Wisdom in Forgetting Everything Important

It’s the end of April. I've reached the age where my short-term memory has packed its bags and left without a forwarding address. Ask me what happened yesterday and I'll stare blankly. Ask me about a Guns N' Roses guitar solo I heard in Van Nuys last May on Victory Boulevard and suddenly I'm Rain Man with a leather jacket.

This is what nobody tells you about middle age: your brain becomes a nightclub with selective door policy. New information waits outside in the Ghostbuster street fog while long-buried trivia sits at the VIP table.

Twenty years ago, before three humans (now 16, 21, and 24) transitioned from internal parasites I grew to then colonize my existence, I read books. Whole books! I had obsessions that lasted longer than an Instagram scroll. I completed sentences without stopping mid-

What was I saying?

Knowledge.

When someone at a dinner asks for a story (writers deserve a union just for this), my mind empties. Not because I don't have stories, but because the filing system in my brain has been replaced with whatever organizational method raccoons use for their collections.

Every day at work, something genuinely interesting happens that I cannot discuss. By the time I speak to a tier-one friend (with whom, eternal vault mode has been activated) , that information has already been replaced by reflecting on a WME Golden Globes party where I asked LL Cool J if his costar Chris O'Donnell ever called him "LL COOL BEAN"? He said, "Yes," then used his cherry chapstick (if you know me you know my lips are regularly dry) and allowed me to also use it before I walked away.

Meanwhile, my responsibilities have multiplied. Feed young adult humans when a single banana is fifty cents. Work job. Maintain house. Sort and take out garbage. Google what to do when ICE is at my door, get a REAL ID. Remember financial aid paperwork, physics homework help, first apartment advice. The vacuum in the living room works again. The bandwidth previously allocated to "Byzantine architecture" now stores seventeen perishable items' expiration dates and fifty-seven different passwords to one thousand and thirty-three streamers. Thanks, TUBI.

The plot twist? My long-term memory is thriving like a pair of Rose Bowl flea market houseplants I cannot kill (I have Albert- a large monstera I got as a single leaf in 2017 Rose Bowl flea and the Kitchen Slut, who hangs over my sink 2017 Rose Bowl flea) . Events I couldn't recall at 44 now return in 4K Ultra HD.

But I'm starting to think this memory reshuffling isn't a bug. It might be a feature.

My brain, in its middle-aged wisdom, has decided that not everything needs to be stored forever. The slideshow I made Tuesday? Gone. The smell of rain on hot pavement in front of Edmonton’s Garneau Theatre in 1992? Preserved in amber.

In automatically filtering out the noise of daily life, we're left with the resonant notes that actually mattered. When that Guns N' Roses solo hit me, something essential was happening—not just musically, but existentially. A moment of transcendence.

Like finding actual solace in an episode of 90 Day Fiancée: The Other Way. Enjoying my ten minutes of tik tok watching every day enough to share them as a transactional exchange of hope.

So maybe I don't know a lot anymore. Maybe I forget names and dates. But what remains are the fragments of beauty, joy, and perfect guitar solos because those are the stones I'm building my second half of life upon.

Next time my mind goes blank when put on the spot, I'll remember that it's not empty at all it's just being selective about what deserves permanent residence. And that's not a deficit. That's wisdom.