To remember who you are, stop looking for someone new and start noticing what you recognise. Remembering works on what was already there, so it feels like familiarity rather than discovery. It doesn't ask you to dig through your past.
The bike is a rental, a size too small, and Lubna hasn't ridden one since she was twelve.
Where the cycle track at Al Qudra begins, she stands over it for longer than she'd like, while the young man from the rental shop lowers the saddle and tells her, kindly, that nobody forgets. She has her doubts. Twenty-six years is a long time. She's already decided she'll wheel it back to the car park if she has to, and make a joke of it later.
She pushes off. The front wheel wobbles twice, badly enough that she grabs at the brakes. Then something in her legs and shoulders takes over without asking her, and she's moving, and the sand is sliding past on both sides of the track.
Nobody taught her anything in those few seconds. Nothing new arrived. What came back was already hers.
A little further on, a second thing returns, harder to put a name to. A camel has wandered onto the verge, and she slows right down to watch it, the way she used to watch everything. She knows that way of watching at once, the way you'd know the smell of a street you used to walk every day.
She doesn't ask herself who this is. She knows exactly who it is. She just hasn't seen her for a while.
How do you remember who you are?
You remember who you are by recognising yourself rather than searching for someone new. Remembering works on what's already yours, so when it happens it tends to feel familiar rather than surprising, like meeting someone you know instead of being introduced to a stranger. It doesn't require going back through your past, and nobody can force it.
If painful memories are already coming up on their own, a doctor or therapist is the person to tell; this piece won't send you looking for them. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Why does remembering feel different from discovering?
Because discovery is a first meeting, and remembering meets something it already knows.
Think about meeting someone new. You need their name, some context, a little time to work out who they are. Now think about walking into a room you know well in the dark. You don't search the wall for the switch. Your hand is already there. Lubna didn't feel she'd found a new woman on that track. She felt she'd run into one she knew.
In Unbecome, my book, I say of one two-sentence law that "the whole book turns on it." Here it is: "You cannot recognize something that was just built. Recognition only works on what existed before."
A few sentences later, in a paragraph of its own, comes the line I'd ask you to keep: "Recognition is the receipt that remembering hands you."
That's why remembering seldom arrives as a revelation. A discovery can be thrilling. A recognition is usually quieter, and there's no surprise in it, only the sense that something had been there all along.
The free Who Am I? masterclass is about recognition too. Of the stillness it points to, its page says: "You have simply forgotten how to recognise it." It's free with GIFT26, a code you add at checkout, and the page gives its full price as USD 297. Its last section is guided. Anyone may stop it partway, open their eyes, put their feet on the floor and talk to someone they trust; if you've had spells of feeling unreal or distant from yourself, or are being treated for it, see your doctor first or skip that section. Receive the Masterclass when the time suits you. Or read on.
Not every familiar pull is recognition of this kind. A drink, a drug, a way of hurting yourself, a person who was bad for you: some of these can feel easy and familiar, and that isn't what I mean by remembering. If one of them is pulling at you, speak to your doctor about it, or to someone who has your back, and if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Does remembering who you are mean digging up your past?
No. Remembering who you are and remembering what happened to you are separate things, and this article is only about the first.
Your past is a record of events. You're the one they happened to, and you aren't kept in a file somewhere behind you. You're here, doing the reading.
So there's no need to go back through childhood, replay old scenes or hunt for the moment it all went wrong. If you want to explore your past, take it to a professional, and let them help you set the pace. The remembering I mean happens now, not back then: an ordinary hour in which something about you feels plainly, quietly familiar.
Can you make yourself remember who you are?
Not by force. Remembering behaves a lot like a name on the tip of your tongue. You know you know it. Hunt for it and it slips further off. Give up, put the kettle on, and often it turns up by itself before the water boils.
Part of the reason is the way people lose track of themselves in the first place. Nothing of you is taken away. Other ways of being get used so often, and for such good reasons, that they come to feel like the whole of you.
In Unbecome I put it plainly: "The work, the real work, has only two movements." One is unbecoming, the coming away of whatever was never yours. The other, remembering, can't be done to order. In the book's words: "The most that can be said about your part in remembering is that you stop standing in the road."
In the book I used a garden to keep the two apart: "Unbecoming is the weeding. Remembering is the growing." You can pull a weed with your own hands. You can't make anything grow by pulling on it.
It was that way for me too. Writing about my own turn, I described it in four sentences: "I did not build the man who came home. I uncovered him. And he was not even surprised. He had been there the entire time."
Unbecoming has a fuller treatment in what does it mean to unbecome. The years of fixing that often come before it are in why self-improvement doesn't work.
The masterclass page says it's for people who sense that "something permanent is waiting to be recognised." The same code applies: Receive the Masterclass.
How can you practise remembering without digging?
None of this takes the place of therapy or medical care, and anyone in treatment should carry on working with their doctor or therapist. If you've been through trauma, or memories you'd rather not meet begin to rise, stop right there. Talk to a professional, or someone you feel safe with, and tell them as much as you want. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. And when old memories surface by themselves and start keeping you awake or crowding your days, book an appointment with your doctor.
This practice keeps to the present, and there's nothing to collect. Run it across a few ordinary days.
- Leave the past where it is. You're not searching your memory. If something from years ago turns up uninvited and it hurts, that's your cue to stop, as described below.
- Watch for small recognitions. They tend to be quiet and ordinary. An answer comes out in your ordinary voice, with no rehearsal first. You're halfway through a chore before you notice you've stopped hurrying. You realise you haven't said a harsh word to yourself all morning. None of this means a drink, a drug, a way of hurting yourself or a person who was bad for you, however familiar they feel; if one of those is pulling at you, tell your doctor or someone you trust, and if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
- Take in where you are. When one comes, notice the plain details: the room, the time of day, who's with you, if anyone. Then go back to your day.
- Let it go uncollected. Make no list and no plan to have more of them. Unbecome has a line for the fixer in us, the voice that would happily turn this into a project: "There is nothing here to be good at."
If the days go by and nothing like this turns up, there's nothing to chase, and you can leave the practice there. If something painful surfaces instead, stop the practice and talk to a professional or a person you feel close to, sharing whatever you choose.
How to find yourself again is a good companion to this one, if searching has been your way in.
What's worth looking for in a book on remembering?
- It leaves nothing new for you to build. If remembering is real, there's nothing to construct. Of remembering, Unbecome says: "Nothing gets installed. Nothing new gets built."
- It doesn't treat remembering as an achievement. The book doesn't soften it: "None of this is achievement."
- It's done with fixing. The page for Unbecome calls it "The end of fixing altogether."
Unbecome is my book.
Remembering has never once been something I could schedule.
From Anne, Amazon review of Unbecome: "This book is so much more than a read."
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. The book quotes in this piece each sit in a longer passage in Unbecome. Get The Paperback