text whereby we are not victims of the things we remember but proud storytellers of all the things we have survived. In clinical settings, we see people present their per‐ sonality through a narrative iden‐ tity where they have accumulated so much experience that they tell their life like a story to transmit knowledge unto others. I think we should all approach life with a nar‐ rative perspective because that is what our recounts and memories provide us with. This further con‐ tributes to wisdom in some cul‐ tures although my perspective on wisdom is how much you have learned from your life experiences rather than how many experiences you have, but that is an article for another day. My degree in Kinesiology and interest in Psychology have taught me that memories are falli‐ ble. While this makes the world seem immensely vast and our‐
selves seem so small, it provides me with relief that despite every‐ thing, we all experience life in a similar way. When it comes to memory-enhancing strategies, we know that exercise, proper diet and good sleep has been very promis‐ ing in maintaining memory health through their own individual mech‐ anisms. My greatest interest lies in the interface between sleep and memory because I have seen great fluctuations in them through my own experience and wonder if they are generalized across the board. I have been learning to identify that while having the ultimate memory would be so beneficial, we some‐ times forget to celebrate that for‐ getting is also healing. Grief subsides as time places a bridge between the trigger and the mem‐ ory and while I do not believe that time is medicine nor an antidote, I do think it has the ability to func‐ tion as a portal. We can choose to
mentally time travel to the corpses of our past failures or to the phan‐ toms of the future fears and while this time travel is a blessing, so too is remaining in this moment and encoding it to the greatest de‐ gree to recall later. I have learned to turn to poetry when I really want to capture a moment because documenting a feeling is the only tangible memory we have besides photographs. Writing allows me to hold on to what I do not want to forget. When I wonder whether I will be remembered, I like to think that my poetry and my writing will be my souvenirs and it will be the poetic complexities of how I view memory that intrigues people about me. Heba Khan is a kinesiology student at McMas‐ ter University with a minor in French and psy‐ chology. Heba invests a lot of her free time into poetry, writing, photography, and creating art to hold on to and explore her creativity. Her thoughts and interests have become very vast and intersectional as a result of her studies. Graphic by Karthyayani Ramesh.
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