I remember everything — so how did I forget this?
Someone quietly gave me a lifeline during a crisis. It took decades — and an impulsive records request — to discover it.
By Thomas Lee
I have a freakish memory, or at least that’s what my friends and family have long told me. Not photographic, but a recall that can easily summon everything from decades-old grievances to useless pop culture tidbits.
My sister offers the best metaphors for my memory. She imagines me as Bob Cratchit in “A Christmas Carol,” entering each of Scrooge’s grudges into a ledger with a scratchy quill pen by candlelight.
She also speaks of my brain as a massive movie library. All I have to do is close my eyes to start reciting dialogue, even reenacting entire scenes, from any film I’ve ever seen.
But my memory recently failed me and I’m still processing what it means.
One recent weekend, I impulsively ordered a copy of my high school transcript, mostly to see if I could get it.
A few days later, a letter from Watertown High School arrived in my mailbox. As I scanned the document with equal parts amusement and curiosity, one detail stood out: During the last term of my senior year, I received an A in calculus.
I stared at it for a few minutes.
I have no memory of this, I thought. This is not possible.
But there it was. In plain ink.
At the risk of overreaction, I must say this grade upended everything I thought I knew about myself.
No, I was bad at math.
Wasn’t I?
Only part of the story
Memories have long fascinated me, especially those we come to accept as largely true. But what happens if a memory you have held for years, one that has proved consequential to how you view yourself or others, turns out to be false? Or, at the very least, only part of the story?
“Once you have an experience and you record it in memory, it doesn’t just stick there in some pristine form waiting to be played back like a recording device,” says psychology researcher and memory expert Elizabeth Loftus. “But rather, new information, new ideas, new thoughts, suggestive information, misinformation can enter people’s conscious awareness and cause a contamination, a distortion, an alteration in memory.”
But my case was different: I didn’t misremember an A. I don’t remember getting it at all. Most people, especially trauma victims, are more likely to block a negative memory.
I was a trauma victim who completely forgot a positive one.
By the time I had reached my senior year of high school, I was experiencing a full-blown mental health crisis. I had finally disclosed to administrators and friends that I’d suffered severe physical and sexual abuse as a child from family members. And now whatever protective shield I had placed around my brain was starting to crack.
The school placed me under a suicide watch. I was living with my best friend, Mike, most of the time and was skipping class. I was racing against time. To survive, I needed to graduate from high school and get out of Watertown. But I could barely pay attention to my schoolwork amid the chaos.
If high school was a race, I was stumbling and crawling toward the finish line.
One glance at my transcript and you can see physical evidence of someone descending toward failure. I received Cs or worse in all of my classes — except for calculus.
That’s why the A upset me. It was an annoying blemish of perfection on a record of otherwise perfect underperformance.
I needed another source. So I rang up Mike, who still lives in Massachusetts.
“Is there a chance you actually earned it?” Mike asked.
“C’mon, man!” I said. “You know me!”
“No, I’m just working through the possibilities,” he said. “I know it’s unlikely.”
Mike did confirm how unstable I was that year.
“You were basically having a nervous breakdown,” he said.
More Scrooge than Cratchit
In 1983, psychologist William Swann developed his theory of self-verification — the idea that people seek to preserve their established self-narratives, even when those narratives are negative. Coherence, not accuracy, becomes the goal.
Take, again, “A Christmas Carol.” Admittedly I had never read the novella. But a few years ago, I visited Charles Dickens’s London house around Christmastime. A professor conducted a reading, and to my surprise, I discovered that Scrooge was not, in fact, bitter or hostile in his youth.
He adored his sister, Fan. He deeply respected his first boss, Mr. Fezziwig. And Scrooge deeply loved his fiancée, Belle, before money distracted him. Scrooge could hardly stand to revisit the memories of his sister and fiancée because they contradicted his current persona as a solitary, unloved miser.
My sister compared me to his secretary, Bob Cratchit. But perhaps I am really more like Scrooge, not in personality but in my determination to keep my self-narrative unchallenged and unchanged.
The idea that I was a terrible student, especially at math, has long informed my identity. I’ve often ridiculed my supposed mathematical ineptitude for comic effect, noting that it clashes with a common stereotype that Asian Americans excel at math — and with the fact that I made a career as a business journalist.
And yet that narrative of an inept math student may still be true. The transcript says I earned an A. It does not say why.
Maybe I understood the material more than I remember. Maybe the calculus teacher, Janet Manning, saw effort where I saw failure.
Or maybe she decided to give me a break of a lifetime.
I had already failed Advanced Placement English that quarter. Another failing grade might have prevented me from graduating.
The only real mystery is why she gave me an A — and not just a passing grade. (I did reach out to Ms. Manning recently but didn’t receive a reply.)
If true, I may have blocked a much more important memory than a mere grade.
Aside from Mike, I felt very much alone that year. Depression and suicidal thoughts isolated me. I thought my teachers, including Ms. Manning, hated me because I didn’t do the work.
Yet she, and likely others, too, had my back — even if I didn’t realize it at the time, or remember it until now.
Soon after we spoke, Mike texted me.
“Good call yesterday,” he wrote. “Nice to remember (and forget) old times.”
Thomas Lee is a freelance journalist who previously worked at the Globe.
This article originally appeared on BostonGlobe.com on May 5, 2026.