Making Meaning with Memories
How archives can shape our narrative identity
“I found the missing link that explains why the NAR was so prominent in my house!!”
I was several layers deep into the Wayback Machine when I found it: my dad’s tiny bible school, The Timothy Center, was accredited by the Apostolic Council for Educational Accountability. The ACEA was a “creative alternative for academic accreditation” from C. Peter Wagner and his New Apostolic Reformation friends. I texted friends who would appreciate my dive down the rabbit hole: “I was always like ‘why was C. Peter Wagner always a name in my house? It was bugging me that I had no concrete proof.’”
recently published a powerful piece on gathering archival evidence as part of their journey to integrate their childhood experiences.I’m obsessed with collecting evangelical artifacts from the 1970s-2000s6. I think it’s because I want to prove that it all really happened, and I know all the gaslighting that comes when you try to tell an evangelical Christian that their beliefs are harmful to others.
Archives serve many purposes: government accountability, collective memory, or historical appreciation. In the last few years of volunteering as a survivor advocate, I’ve come to appreciate the powerful role that archives and primary sources play in survivors’ healing. When abusers and enablers insist that something never happened, documentation is a powerful weapon. When trauma fragments our memories, primary sources can help unlock details that we’ve misplaced.
As a child and young adult, suppression was one of the only tools in my toolbox. Raised in a family focused on control, the ability to control (suppress) my emotions, behaviors, and memories was critical. Letting myself feel meant pain and punishment. While useful for survival, suppressing emotions and memories comes at a high cost. Because I used suppression so frequently, many parts of my childhood were lost to me. In these cases, primary sources can act as powerful anchors—tangible artifacts that help us retrieve memories lost in time.
Psychologists use the term “narrative identity” to understand how people construct stories about their lives to provide themselves with meaning and purpose. The stories we narrate about our lives answer fundamental questions: Who am I? How did I come to be? Where is my life going? In particular, people who emphasize personal agency and exploration to construct meaning out of adversity “tend to enjoy higher levels of mental health, well-being, and maturity.”1
There’s fascinating scholarly discussion around the impact of memory modification on narrative identity and well‐being.2 I only lurk on the edges of these discussions, but as an archivist and a trauma survivor, I believe that it is harder to construct a meaningful narrative when we distrust our ability to recall our past. Primary sources—particularly physical objects—allow people who have experienced trauma to reassure themselves that a certain event did occur or that a specific person did indeed send that email.
In the archives, we require researchers to use pencils so that we can erase the marks if someone absentmindedly takes notes on a one-of-a-kind document. We ask people to leave folders flat on the table and handle pages carefully. And if researchers follow instructions, those documents will likely last hundreds of years sitting on the shelves in our climate-controlled storage.
Digital files are not so resilient. Contrary to what many people think, digital files have a remarkably short shelf-life. If you still have CDs, they may not last much longer than 10 years. Without proper maintenance, you probably will be unable to open your digital photos in 15 years.
My generation straddled the analog world and digital world. My childhood exists largely in 4x6 prints tucked into Kinney Drugs photo envelopes. Ironically, I can only access those photographs through the scans I made when I was living with my parents during graduate school. Soon those digital scans will degrade to the point where I can’t open them. Bit rot will dissolve the pixels into nothingness.
20 years after I dumped my journals into the burn barrel, I launched this substack. I’m writing myself back into the narrative before the digital memories of my childhood vanish. There may be symbolic annihilation but it will not be self-inflicted. Not any longer.
I want people to know that children like me exist. Not just as the stereotypical weird homeschoolers or cult members, but as courageous and resilient survivors.
Dan Mcadams & Kate McLean," “Narrative Identity,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no 3 (2013), 233-238. DOI: 10.1177/0963721413475622
Przemysław Zawadzki & Agnieszka K. Adamczyk, “To remember, or not to remember? Potential impact of memory modification on narrative identity, personal agency, mental health, and well‐being.” Bioethics 35, no 9 (2021), 891–899. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12926
When I tell my kids some of the thing that happened to me and others, they can scarcely believe it. It was another world, but it impinges on the present in harmful ways when we don’t call it out and say, “I know where this comes from. I’ve seen this before.”