Life is full of firsts. First kiss. First love. First Netflix binge.
What follows next is the first time I realized I was weird. Strange. Completely off center. And not in a fun aren’t I cool way. In a what is going on here, Decfcom major emergency way.
I will try to relate this story the best I know how, but it’s slightly jumbled and largely unexamined since that day. You are literally the third person I’ve told this to. This is break into the vault kind of stuff. Tell no one. You get the idea.
But I feel like you need to get to know me. You need to understand where I’m coming from because I promised you that, didn’t I? I mean to keep that promise. Mostly, as you will see in a few, this particular memory comes from a place of confusion and deep emotional turmoil. It was the first time I knew I was messed up, broken, not normal, or as the kids say these days, neurodivergent.
Here goes…
Memories are weird, aren’t they? You’ve got these snippets that don’t necessarily make sense. They aren’t cohesive. So I’m going to reveal this to you in pieces.
What I know—I was a reader well before I was a writer. Well before.
What I was told—that I taught myself to read at a very early age.
What I know—I was and am extremely dyslexic
My mother read to us at when we were really young. I specifically remember that she read Lassie Come Home to my brother and I one chapter at a time. We always begged for one more chapter every single night. She did not relent. Mom knew how to build anticipation.
What I was told—I was put in an experimental phonics program in Kindergarten(which theoretically was after I learned to read) and that at the same time I was reading Hebrew.
What I know—extensive phonics training significantly improves Dyslexia
What I remember—clearly picking out Where The Wild Things Are in preschool, turning the pages, and reading every word to myself.
But this is how memories work, especially distant ones. Especially those told to us-our personal histories narrated by the ones who love us.
We are human. We forget things. We remember very specific events and have sensory recall of pieces of those events. Maybe they don’t all add up with the timelines.
It’s essentially memory soup.
Here’s what happened—I had been absent from school for a few days, sick with something.
When I returned to school, I saw a wallpaper border close to the ceiling that must have always been there (this wasn’t at the beginning of the schoolyear) but I’d never noticed it before or if I had, I gave it no import. Anyway, it was simply the alphabet.
But this day, I stared at those things on the wall. Those symbols. And I freaked out. Because I had no idea what they were. Those letters.
Despite having been a fluent reader in both Hebrew and English. I stared at those alien symbols and panicked. Only from the outside, I looked like all was fine. That’s what I did. That’s what I do. I panic quietly.
I have since learned there is a term for what I experienced. Jaime vu. The opposite of De ja vu. It is this weird phenomenon where something you know that you know and have experienced before feels new. Only you know that what you are feeling isn’t real. If this sounds hard to deal with as an adult, you better believe that five-year-old me could not put this into words.
I just knew I was different. Plus, I learned I couldn’t always trust what I saw. Or what I knew. That messes with you as a kid. And what I knew with absolute clarity is that there was something wrong with me. Something wrong with my brain.
Only since I’d never seen or heard of this happening to anyone else, it was uniquely wrong with me. So I kept that shit locked down. I never told a single person about it. I just tried to be sure to not lose any other knowledge. Do you know what that’s like? Trying to hold onto what you’ve learned? It’s exhausting.
Researching Jaime vu I found that this is linked to seizures, dyslexia, and migraines. What isn’t clear is how often this happens in kids.
Prior to this memory, all of the things I remembered doing, seeing, experiencing, living, were all regarded with a form of nostalgia.
Moving forward after this memory was the inescapable and growing feeling that my memory was impaired and unreliable
I started doing things like tapping the wall above my bed at night before going to sleep as I was worried I’d find myself in some other place, having forgotten ever traveling there. It doesn’t make sense and I’m not trying to drive too fine a point on this, but my experience of Jaime vu was a seminal experience that spread like an infection. The belief that my mind couldn’t be trusted seeped into everything. It literally changed how I looked at the world and myself in that world. In short, I questioned myself. All the time.
As a writer I tried to mirror that experience in The Sister Pact where complicated grief altered my main character’s perception of reality.
Here’s an excerpt from the opening scene where Allie and her parents are discussing her upcoming junior year while she imagines that her dead sister is there with her…
The surface of the table is so shiny, I see my face in it, distorted and strange. I blink again. Caught somewhere between the blink and the reflection, I see her, Leah, in her black leotard and pink tights, like she’s waiting in the wings for her cue.
Even though I realize it’s just a trick of the light, I can’t help staring at not-real-Leah, waiting to see if she’s going to dance.”
This is just the beginning for Allie. The ghostly sightings become more invasive. They build. Then at the lowest point of the book, Allie realizes why she’s seeing these different versions of her late sister. And it’s wild.
The Sister Pact actually won YALSA popular paperbacks in 2016 for books with an unreliable narrator. I was invited to ALA that year and was able to do a librarian speed dating event. So fun! But definitely a reflection of my ability to portray the confusion and dissociation of someone suffering from trauma. (In my case my trauma was my dyslexia)
I’ve always been drawn to these kinds of stories. The ones where you are not sure what’s going on or why. Where the truth is lurking under the surface and it takes the length of the book and many trials for the characters to uncover it. Then once they do discover the truth, they have to decide what to do with their newfound knowledge.
Some of my favorites include:
The Shining Girls (both the book and the movie)
This week I am highlighting a local(ish) book store. Check out Books & Books— one of my favorite bookstores. I’ve attended many author signings there and have had the opportunity to sign some of my own books there as well.
And while we are talking about neurodivergence, check out this YouTube channel How to ADHD. It’s a fantastic look into the why’s and how’s of living with ADHD. I’m so grateful there are resources for people these days so that no one has to feel like the only person on their island of weird. Here’s a specific How to ADHD video on how ADHD messes with your memory.
My current obsession with shows told by unreliable narrators is Yellowjackets. What a ride! And The Undoing. “It’s worse than you think.” Or the ever popular Girl on a Train, Sharp Objects, and Gone Girl.
Want more? Here’s a great interview from NPR with neurologist Oliver Sacks on hallucinations. Since stress negatively impacts migraines and memory and overall wellness, here’s a guided meditation to reduce stress.
See you all next week when we’ll talk about #siblingsday and what that means to me especially during a particularly terrifying experience.
Until then, if you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share widely…
Thanks for your honesty! I'd never heard of Jaime before. It's fascinating. I wonder how many other kids out there are experiencing this with now way to articulate what they're feeling.
i too read at a super early age and have ADHD! but i got diagnosed only a few years ago officially. i just thought i was weird. but your opposite of deja vu thing must be a trip. does it still happen? i gotta look that up. interesting!