Memory, Identity & Reputation

When I was about six years old, I went with my grandmother to a nursing home. We were visiting my great-grandmother, who was in the last years of her life and suffered from Alzheimer's Disease. There were pictures of her holding me as a baby from a few years earlier, a hint of a smile on her face.

She was my oldest living relative. I was ready to crawl into her lap and get petted and cuddled. As I reached out for that first touch, my grandmother snatched my hand back.

"She bites."

I was shocked and confused. Kids (bad kids) bite. Adults don't. But it was my introduction to understanding what it means to lose your memory. She didn't know the people who cared for her. She couldn't remember the work she did throughout her life. Family, friends, coworkers, pets, travel, all the textures of life--were gone. She was alive but who she was gone.

My November seizure left holes in my memory. There are several days that are deeply fogged. Reconstructing them is like a terrible student film with awkward cut shots to confusing and irrelevant scenes.

The next few weeks were better but it was though I was always drunk. It didn't stop me from closing on a major real estate project, but not everything was there.

Nevertheless, I went back to work. I love my job. Shying away from reengaging with the day-to-day struggles of meaningful work was option I never allowed myself.

Losing part of your memory poses a real risk to your career. One mistake, one oversight, one key fact forgotten, can destroy a career and professional reputation built over years of work and education.

A striking example is Kurt Eichenwald, a former star investigative journalist at the New York Times. Eichenwald's work was key unearthing online child pornography rings. He hid his epilepsy throughout his career, afraid that editors concerns about its impact on his memory would trump his ability to do his job. National Public Radio described his reasoning and the ultimate fallout.

"Eichenwald's famed meticulous reporting methods on corporate intrigue masked his deeply unreliable memory for names, facts and events. Medical authorities such as Dr. Gregory Bergey, director of the Johns Hopkins Epilepsy Center, confirm such memory loss can indeed result from those repeated seizures.

"There are reporters who are stupid. There are reporters who are lazy. There are reporters who are drunk," Eichenwald says. "I'm none of those things. And I didn't want to be judged on my challenges. I wanted to be judged on my work."

He never wanted to acknowledge his memory loss to his editors because, he says, he believed they wouldn't let him be a reporter. "

Eichenwald, an investigative journalist who broke a significant story on online child pornography, came under criticism when he forgot to reveal that he had financially supported legal and mental health services for his source, who was both a victim and perpetrator of child porn. Eichenwald's position is that he simply forgot to tell his editors at the Times.

"I believed that I had enough of a reputation and enough of a track record that, when I say to other journalists, 'I don't remember,' that they could simply accept that — or prove me wrong," Eichenwald says. "But instead, it just became fodder for more attacks — and for people saying, suggesting, that I was obviously hiding something, because I was saying I forgot."

People are kind and cruel. They empathize with a health concern but fear it. Consciously or unconsciously it influence their judgment of you ability to produce. It eases the ability to prejudge a person, not as significantly as race or class certainly, but it still applies as a factor.

It is more difficult to do work with a condition that affects memory. It takes more time, requires developing systems to capture and retain information. I can't multitask well. I lose track of details if they are not written down. I have to ask colleagues and peers for their patience as I struggle to retrieve a conversation or fact from the dark hole of my cranium.

Its humiliating.
Often I'm pissed at myself for not being able to do what has been easy throughout my life.
And though I'm comfortable telling people about my epilepsy and that it can interrupt my memory, I fear judgment as Eichenwald did.

My fear of forgetting is constant. I hope it will be something small and forgivable. But there is a risk that it will end my career or cut me off from the people love.

Someday I could forget who I am and bite the open hand of my trusting great granddaughter.