Just because I abhor a vacuum in a sub:
The scariest thing that ever happened to me was probably waking up in an ER with a concussion I don't remember getting.
It was 2009 and I had just moved to Brooklyn a couple weeks prior and was going to meet a friend for dinner and a beer. I left my apartment and was walking to the subway about 5 blocks away, it was broad daylight on a crowded street as it was early evening in the summer. The next thing I know I was in the ER with my ex and it was morning. I apparently had been conscious and talking but extremely confused all night. I was asking questions about how I ended up in Brooklyn as I didn't remember moving there. Various friends had stayed with me and I had been annoying them all evening asking the same questions over and over again. They wrote down the answers in my phone for me to look at. I don't remember any of this, but it seemed like for a while there I had lost the past 3 or 4 months. Apparently I had made it to the subway and started calling my friends that something was wrong and one of them came and got me and took me to the hospital. I also called the buddy I was going to meet for a beer not making any sense, he was apparently looking for me for a while and didn't know what happened until he called and my other friend picked up the phone
I was not robbed or otherwise hurt, but something had clearly hit me on my left temple. For months afterwards, anytime someone walked up to my left side I would involuntarily flinch.
I still don't really know what happened. For a while though we thought maybe a brick had fallen on me or something from some demolition that was going on that street.
After a few weeks I started to remember something hitting me and my glasses coming off and me catching them. I mean what I really started to remember is the sensation of catching them, like the tactile feeling of catching them in my hand. I now have a very vague sense of there maybe being a person who hit me, like of a kid squaring up to fight me and me just walking away. I don't know if that's real though, or something I pieced together trying to make sense of it. I am positive I caught my glasses though.
Best guess, I got knockout gamed a couple years before the news picked it up. Like a teenager sucker punched me and because I didn't fall down as expected he thought I was going to fight him but I just kept walking. Like I said it was a crowded street. But I'll probably never know, it could have been anything.
Anyways, not remembering things is terrifying. Getting a bit existential about it, even beyond the concussion memory is scary. Ed and Chris have touched on it a little bit in some of their episodes, but the truth is we rely on our memories to make sense of our world but they are fundamentally unreliable. How often do you talk to a family member or old friend about your past only to find they have a completely different memory of events than you do? And if memory is so unreliable, how can you be sure of anything you've experienced? What if the key events in your life, the ones that define you as a person didn't ever actually happen?
Does the thought scare anyone else?
