The Places That Made Me · 17 Practices

Start at your childhood front door. Which way did you turn? You will find you can do the whole route. The corner where the pavement changed. The gate that stuck. The house with the dog. You have not been there in decades and you could still walk it in the dark, and meanwhile you cannot reliably remember what you did last Tuesday. That is not a quirk. Place cells and grid cells sit in the hippocampus, which is also where autobiographical memory is handled. When you say a place holds a memory, you are describing where the memory is filed. So you make one map, by hand, on paper, over a few weeks. About twenty places, each with a story rather than a label. The house you were brought home to. The city that changed you. The place you were heartbroken, and the different place where you recovered, which is almost never the same one. The waiting room. The last place you saw somebody who is dead. For every pin you write six things, and the sixth is the point: not what happened to you there, but who you were when you were there. Most women read ten of these back and find three or four distinct versions of themselves, with the boundaries falling at a move rather than a birthday. There is a section on the places you cannot go back to, and two words for that feeling that English does not have. There is a page on looking up your old house on a street map at midnight, which everybody does and nobody admits. And there is one on the place you never want to see again, which goes on the map as a pin and nothing else if that is all you want to give it. The map is drawn to emotional scale. Your grandmother's kitchen can be bigger than the city it was in. Seventeen steps. The last pin is one place you have never been, which turns the whole thing from a record into a map of a life still being made.