323: What if you were suddenly a blank slate?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.

Hi listeners, I'm excited to announce that next week we begin a six-part miniseries called The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family. The series will run beginning next week through the end of the season in late July and will feature six stories of people who have challenged some of our deepest societal norms by reimagining what love and family can be. We'll hear from an asexual man who forms a unique family structure to raise a child,

a transmasculine man who becomes pregnant, and a person who grows up in a polyamorous family, just to name a few. The series, created in collaboration with Heath and Lily from the Modern Family Institute, will also feature bonus content conversations between me and several experts in the field.

including Jessica Fern and Alex Chen. So stay tuned next week as we begin the 82% series. But now we bring you the unbelievable story of Ingrid Rojas Contreras for today's episode, What If You Were Suddenly a Blank Slate? I'm not thinking about the future. I'm not thinking about what's happening. I am just in the moment and it feels like I am listening to my own blood, like some sort of internal song.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 323, What If You Were Suddenly a Blank Slate?

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Both sides of my family are from this area in the Andes in Colombia. My father's family, they grew up in Santander in the city called Bucaramanga.

My dad had maybe nine brothers and sisters. His dad used to work at this farm and he was the person who looked over this rich guy's farm. And the paramilitary came and burnt everything to the ground trying to evict families, which is something that happens in Colombia a lot, as a way to grow cocaine, basically.

He tells the story of his own mother carrying him as a baby and fleeing this burning farmland and they just kind of went into the forest and had to, you know, find a new place. They didn't have money for coffee filters, but he would use like a sock as a way to filter the coffee and he has like these memories of building the fire and making the coffee through the sock and then preparing it for the family. He was very intelligent.

And by the time that he was in high school, my dad was making more money than his dad. I think he's always just felt the weight of somehow I've become the person that looks after the whole family. He got a scholarship to go to university in Bogota and he studied engineering there.

He knew my mother. They went to the same school and that's where they met. And my mother was a horrible student. She was his complete opposite in every way, where he was very studious and loved books and very serious and responsible. She was completely irresponsible and joyful and more interested in making jokes in class than learning anything that a teacher could have to offer to her.

My mother's father, my grandfather, was a curandero, and he came from a lineage of curanderos. A curandero is someone who knows plant medicine, probably what we would call a medicine man. So it has a spiritual angle to it. It involves sort of being the healer of the village.

Anytime that somebody came that had an illness of some sort, he knew what plant to get. So he would hike out into the mountains and he would collect it and he would bring it back and, you know, prepare it for the person. A lot of people would come from mental instabilities or depression. There were women who wanted to get pregnant and he would, you know, give them certain plants. And there were women who wanted to have abortions and he would give them certain plants.

He did a lot of medicine for people who were suffering from heartbreak. He would say a prayer over the water and then give the water to the person to drink. And the idea is that they would be ingesting this prayer

In his family line, only the men became curanderos. So my grandfather was supposed to initiate one of his sons, but he didn't think that any of his sons had what it took to be a curandero. What he actually said was that they didn't have the testicles. He said the only person that he thought had the testicles to be a curandero would be my mother. But in his lineage, women were not supposed to become healers in this way.

So he just decided that he wasn't going to teach anyone and that it was going to end with him. When my mother was eight, there was a community well, and two of her cousins came over and told her, we need to go see this well because in this well is the blackest black that you'll ever see. So as they were standing over the well and looking down, she just fell in.

Her shoulder got dislocated. She broke the side of her face and she was unconscious. My grandfather happened to be looking after plants. So he was in this garden in the back of their house. There was this coffee jungle and he was back there. And he said that he heard her calling for him and was just very desperate to find her. And eventually he figured out that she had fallen into the well.

When he came upon her, he really thought that she was dead. But she was breathing, and so he lifted her very carefully and just carried her home. My grandmother was just yelling, take her to a real hospital. And he just decided that he was going to keep her in his own healing room that he had for people. And he prepared plants to put over her broken face so that the skin would heal without scarring.

He built like a drip system to feed her the serum that he had prepared. She actually went into a coma. My grandfather was just desperate to bring her back and he set up a chair next to her cot and then just would look for her in his dreams trying to find her and bring her back. When she opened her eyes, she did not recognize anybody.

What she said at the time was like, why did you kidnap me? Like, why did you have me captive? She had been dreaming that she had died in this town that spoke a language that she couldn't speak. And she was a ghost in her dreams. And so when she woke up, she had a complete split from reality to the point where she was thinking that the dream life was the waking life.

She started to hear voices or started to hear things that other people couldn't hear. She started to do this thing, which was sitting by my grandfather's receiving room to watch people that came to him with some kind of ailment or needed some kind of help.

This woman came to see him. My mother was standing nearby and my mother looked down at this chair and she said, oh, you better see him first. That man is bleeding from the stomach. And the woman said, like, there's no one there. And my mother said, no, he's wearing like a plaid shirt. He's bleeding from the stomach. This is what he looks like. And the woman said, like, oh, that's my son. Like, this is the reason why I actually came to see you. You know, my son died.

My grandfather looked at my mother in amazement. And so it was at that point when my grandfather started to feel that something had changed in my mother from this accident and through the journey of amnesia that something had opened in her.

He recalled this rule that women couldn't become curanderas, but he sort of felt that she had become a curandera through this accident. So he didn't feel like he was breaking the rule in a way. And that's when he started to teach her curanderas.

So her being very young, eight, nine years old at this point, he started to bring her to the mountains and telling her, oh, this plant is for this, and bringing her to the kitchen when he was preparing plant medicine for people and saying, like, this is how we do an infusion. This is how you say a prayer so that travels into the water. So she's the first female curandera in my family's lineage. Because my father got the scholarship to attend university,

They got married, moved to Bogota, and she began to study fashion design. But with time, she just found herself sort of gravitating to being a curandera. So she started to do healing through speaking prayers into water and selling water. She also started to do tarot cards.

I was born two years after my sister, and that was the year my grandfather told her, I'm going to die next year, by the next time the rain season comes. So I want to come and say goodbye to you. And he had a heart attack eventually. And he did, and he died like the next rain season. I grew up in Bogota, and I was a very observant child,

My mother had her curandera business in the attic of our house. And I was completely obsessed with watching people arrive and just seeing if I could tell what it was that was wrong. What is the thing that brought you to our house? We didn't have a lot of books in the house. So I think of that as my sort of first literature. You sort of start to hear like these very real stories about what the women are going through.

women who had married monstrous men and the things that these men were doing to them. Or, you know, just having ambitions but not being able to make them come into fruition because of the patriarchal society rules they were surrounded by. So I remember just being very interested and fascinated by all of that.

Everyone is going to be visited by crisis at one point or another. And there's something about seeing people arrive constantly to your house in the middle of a crisis that changes you. In the 90s, Colombia is led by an elitist group of people and regular people don't have an opportunity and there's no equality there.

Over time, as the guerrillas sort of became more militarized, people like Pablo Escobar and also Pablo Escobar would say, like, we need people to defend our farms where we're growing drugs against the communist people. And so we're going to arm this other group of right wing paramilitary. So then it just kind of blew out of proportion over time.

Because both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries started to get into the drug trade as a way to finance their civil war, there was a lot of violence happening in the country. There were car bombs that were going off. You know how like every day you sort of look at the weather and you're like, what do I need to wear to go out? I think for us at the time in Bogota, Pablo Escobar was like the weather guy.

We looked at the newspaper and we saw where paramilitaries and guerrillas were having confrontations so that we knew what areas to avoid. There was all this danger and violence in the air. I was about 13 years old when a series of events happened that led to our leaving Colombia.

I think Pablo Escobar had just passed away. And it was this moment where we, I think as Colombians, felt like, oh, maybe this is the moment when peace will begin for everyone. But once Pablo Escobar is gone, then there's this vacuum of power. And then they're both like, how much land can we take? And how much control can we have over the drug trade? And so things sort of escalate.

We had this young woman who had been with our family for many years doing the domestic work. She was part of a family who was displaced by the paramilitary, just like my father's family was displaced by the paramilitary from their land. And they had arrived to Bogota without anything.

And my mother had offered her, do you want to come and maybe do dishes for us or do domestic work and I'll pay you. And that's a way to survive and help your family survive. She was maybe 16. The place where she lived, which was in the outskirts of Bogota, became infiltrated by guerrillas.

The guerrillas have to meet a quota of people that they kidnap as a way to finance their war against the government. At some point, they just came to her and they said, we need you to collaborate with us on a kidnapping. We need you to facilitate us taking the two young girls of the family where you work. And if you don't do this, we will start to kill your family members one by one.

So then she was put in this situation where she then has to decide, do I turn these two girls in that I've known for a number of years? These two girls, you know, being my sister and I. Or do I save my family? She eventually did try to turn us over to the guerrillas. The story was that she was going to get ice cream outside of the neighborhood. And that was what we were doing that day.

And so she took us outside of the neighborhood. And somehow my sister understood that something was wrong. And she said, something is wrong and I need to run back and get my mother. And then I was with this young woman, just her and I.

We started to walk and walk. And at some point, it just became obvious that we were no longer getting ice cream. And it was strange that my sister had left and I kept saying like, we should go back and see what happened. And this young woman kept saying like, no, we're almost there.

We were waiting at this corner and I just started to cry because I felt that, you know, something bad was going to happen. I sort of understood because kidnappings were so prevalent. I started to just beg her, like, please bring me back. Please let me go. I just remember this changing look that took over her face.

She was completely 100% hardened and then completely 100% heartbroken. She just looked at me and she just started to cry. And she said, okay, I'm going to get you into a taxi and get you home.

So we got into a taxi the whole time. She's just crying and just unable to speak. And we get home and my mother's waiting for us. And she's incredibly angry, both at the young woman, but also at me. She kept saying like, how could you not see this coming? Or how did you not understand what was going on?

This young woman, because she didn't go through with it, they knew that she had changed their mind. So she was brutally raped and beaten up and then abandoned and left for dead in a field. She was found by this old woman who just came across her body and she thought that she was dead.

She couldn't remember anything. And the only thing that she could remember was her phone number, which was so heartbreaking. So we received the call and we just we knew exactly what had happened and why. I remember feeling very guilty about that because I had asked her to spare me. And so because of that, then this had happened to her.

I sort of saw it at the time like we had switched places and that whatever had happened to her was meant to happen to me because of the difference of privilege that there was and the difference of safety that there was between her and I. We had this relationship. It was conflicted, but we were friends. So I did have this urgent feeling that I wanted to protect her.

And when something happened to her, I just understood that to be my fault. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. It's been a busy season of events and travel, and my wardrobe has taken a beating. A total overhaul isn't in my budget, but I'm replacing some of those worn-out pieces with affordable, high-quality essentials from Quince. By partnering with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us.

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We

kept receiving phone calls to our house from guerrilla members continuing to threaten us. They would say things like, this is the time when the girls are picked up by the school bus, and this is the time when they get back, and this is the day that you go to the market, and this is the license plates of your car. My sister and I just like were not allowed to pick up the phone anymore.

My mother would be the person who would pick up the phone. And I have never seen anyone be able to be so calm during moments like this. And she would just be mocking them. That was helpful. Because if she wasn't scared, then it sort of made us a little bit less scared. But of course, we were like completely terrified. Then my dad was kidnapped from his place of work.

Guerrilla members just arrived when he was about to get into his car and they took him. They put him in this little shed, bound his hands together, and he stayed there all night. He felt like he was never going to see us again. He didn't know if he was going to make it out alive. The next day when they took him to meet the leader of the guerrilla camp, it was one of his best friends from elementary school.

And so then when he saw this, you know, old elementary school friend, this guy who was now a guerrilla leader was like, how are you? It's been so many years. And just kind of laughing and being like, how's your family? How are the girls? And because of this friendship, he said like, oh, yeah, we're not keeping you. You know, we're going to release you and let you go.

The whole confluence of the calls and like the near kidnapping of me and my sister and then the actual kidnapping of my dad. It kind of felt like we were just getting closer and closer and closer to something really bad happening. And we just left. We went to Venezuela. When you escape physical danger, like the immediate things that are happening, I feel that you almost feel it more the moment that you're safe. Yeah.

when you're in the moment you're in survival mode and so there's part of you that is like oh I can't feel that yet actually what we need to do is figure out how to make it out alive and so a lot of the emotional processing gets delayed and delayed and delayed and so by the time that we were in Venezuela even though we were safer like there's no one after us I felt so endangered and

I remember like having panic attacks every morning before going to school. Just feeling so anxious all the time, not really understanding why. The only kind of explanation for me to be having these episodes would be like there's something wrong with my body.

It was 2001. I was about 18. It was just time for me to go to college. And one of my cousins lived in Chicago. So I moved to Chicago and I was, you know, enrolled for journalism school at Columbia College in Chicago. I had always wanted to do something with stories.

And so I had already figured out the money part and I was like, I'm going to do translation interpreting work and I can make a living doing that. Then I could follow my dream of writing.

Growing up, my aunts and uncles would always tell me stories about, you know, I saw your grandfather move clouds, and this is what it looked like. We were standing in this mountain, and some of them would be like, he raised his hand, and then he would say like a series of words that we never heard. And that was one of the first things that I wrote and turned into a nonfiction workshop. The feedback that I got was, oh, this is fiction. This is not something that actually happened.

There's like a colonialist mindset in the United States of thinking only our culture is correct or only our culture is the truth. And everything else that deviates from that is made up or it's fiction. As a new arrival was very confusing to me because in Colombia, the way that we greet each other is not like, how are you? But we say like, what have you dreamt recently?

So to arrive in the United States and they couldn't imagine or understand the world that I have just come from, there was something very disorienting about all of that. Through college, I started to work on the book that eventually became my first novel, which is based on the whole kidnapping situation that happened. I think because my hand was slapped when I tried to write about my grandfather, I

I was like, okay, fine, I will write about this other wild thing that happened. And even though that's a true story, I'm going to tell it as a fake story. So I fictionalized it. So I was working on that. And I fell in love with my partner who we met at this comedy club in Chicago.

We just started talking. He was a visual artist. He still is a visual artist. And we were like on and off. And eventually, by the time that I was in grad school, we were like in a steady relationship.

So 2007 in October, I was 23 years old and I had come across this black dress that was a Vera Wang that I had no business buying because where would I ever wear this? But it was so beautiful and it was on sale that I just bought it and it was a little big on me and I had taken it to a seamstress so that the fit would be right.

So I had sent a photo of this dress to my mother and I had said, this is the new love of my life. She made an international call to my cell phone and she said, you cannot get this dress. You need to stay away from this dress. This dress is cursed. And I told her, I mean, it's new, so I don't understand how it can be cursed.

She said, I need you to listen to me and I need you to stay away from this dress. And I didn't say yes or no. What I said was, I heard you. And that was the end of our conversation. So the seamstress called and said, your dress is ready. So I got on my bike and I was in a rush to pick up the dress before the seamstress closed.

I wasn't even wearing a helmet. And as I was biking, somebody opened the car door into the bike lane and I just crashed into it. So I flipped in the air and flipped over the door and like landed on the other side and hit my head really hard. I remember the sound that my cranium made when it hit the pavement and it was just this loud cracking sound.

I like rose up and I just felt strange but didn't understand exactly what had happened to me. I just saw that there was a bicycle on the ground and I saw that it was all kind of twisted and this car door was opened and dented. Oh, I must have somehow crashed into this car.

The man who had opened the door asked if I was okay, and I said, yeah. And he sort of touched my waist as he was asking me if I was okay, and I just, I felt like I just needed to get out of there. And I picked up my bike and I tried to go. And then in that moment, understood that even though what I knew what a bike was, I didn't know how it functioned.

This man came over and was sort of like mocking me and saying like, oh, it's just that the wheel is twisted. So obviously you can't go forward. And he fixed it for me. And then I just rode away. At some point, I got off to figure out like what was going on. And I saw that there was these road signs. And I remember that one said like Madison and the other one said Halstead. And that's when I was like, oh, I don't recognize those names.

And then I realized I don't know where I came from. I don't know where I was going. And then it just became, I don't know what my name is. I don't know what city I am in. I don't know what year this is. I don't know anything. So when I tried to think back of what had happened before, there was nothing. It's almost like the world began with this sound of my head hitting the pavement.

I sort of felt bodiless in a way. I wasn't completely aware that I was in a body or that I was in a person. As I realized that I didn't know who I was or didn't know my family or didn't know where I came from, it didn't seem like a good or a bad thing. It just seemed like that's what was happening. It felt like having a radiating center and also being connected to everything at the same time.

And the degree of energy I felt coursing through me was so intense that I didn't give a second thought or even a first thought to the fact that I didn't know who I was. Once I realized I am completely like severed from my past, I felt a degree of happiness that I have not felt ever in my life.

It was just this complete flooding of my body of just weightlessness and the whole like center of my being was just the present. I remember being at this corner and just seeing sunlight and feeling as if I was coming to know what sunlight was for the first time.

oh my god, that's sunlight. And oh my god, that's a color. And those are clouds. And this is what it feels like to stand here. And it almost felt like I was a galaxy that was going to explode.

And I remember seeing cars going by and people walking by and idling and just being in this state of wonder that was so loud and was so beautiful that I immediately was like, this is great. When you experience happiness,

you know, something good happened in your life, it feels like a limited happiness, or it feels like a happiness that's tied to something specific. And this sort of happiness that I experienced during amnesia was not tied to anything, but it was just the joy of being alive, which I think through the process of having memory, we lose because we become so used to being alive.

In this moment of utter joy, I look down and I see that I have this bag that I'm wearing. And I immediately understand that in this bag are clues for what my life was or like where I came from. But I think I want to find the ocean and just somehow get on a boat and leave.

and just continue my life from this moment. Because what could be better than having this utter state of wonder and joy that feels eternal and beautiful and sort of unattainable? So I decide that I'm going to just go to the trash can and just throw this bag away.

I see the trash can. I start to walk over there. And as I am taking the bag off, I make eye contact with a woman through this storefront window. And then I realized that I am just looking at myself.

I hadn't thought whether I was a woman or a man at that point. And so I was just like, oh, I'm a woman. And like my hair was all disheveled. And I just walked up to this reflection, just in complete wonder over seeing myself for the first time. I remember getting really close to the reflection and then looking into my eyes. And there was something so eerie about that.

You know, like you're looking at your body and your body is carrying the history of where you've been and what's happened to you and all of this stuff. The entry point into having this knowledge of who I was or where I came from was in the eyes, but it was also a room that I was locked out of. I couldn't access it at all. And I just kept staring and staring. And in that moment, I was like, oh, I look like an immigrant.

I remember thinking, like, am I from the Middle East or am I South American or am I from the Caribbean? I tried in that moment to picture what my parents looked like and could not bring anything to mind. Once I saw myself, I no longer knew what I should do.

It's almost like the pull of my own reflection and the fact that I couldn't put what I look like behind. I couldn't leave that behind. I couldn't just say, oh, I know what I look like. Now I will get on a boat and just forget about it. I couldn't forget about it. It was like this black hole that was just like pulling me in. And at the same time, I didn't want to give

give up on this state of wonder and the state of amnesia and the joy that it was just opening in me. So after some time, I opened my bag, I pulled out my cell phone, and then somehow knew how cell phones worked and also knew what a cell phone was. And I dialed the last person that I had been talking to.

The screen said Jeff. I didn't know who Jeff was. I had no idea who I was dialing at all. And I don't know what my plan was, honestly. Jeff picks up and I said, hi, how are you? And I tried to sound as normal as possible. And immediately, Jeff, who happens to be at the time my sister's fiance, said, Ingrid, oh my God, what happened? Are you okay? What happened? Where are you?

He just heard, you know, in my voice, probably that I had been in an accident and was inside of some state of who knows what. Obvious to him, not to me. To me, I sounded completely put together. Once I heard Ingrid, I didn't remember that as my name. And that made me so sad that I just started to cry. So I told him like, oh, I've been in an accident.

And he said, okay, you need to call Jeremiah, who's your boyfriend, and you need to go to the emergency room. I said, oh, you're right. I think it's the adrenaline. It's not letting me think straight. In this moment, I am deciding that I'm going to keep my amnesia a secret because I somehow feel that if I tell people that I have amnesia, that someone is going to try to fix it. And I don't want it to be fixed.

I decided like I just need to figure out how to pretend to know who people are and I need to somehow do it convincingly so that I can just be left alone and have amnesia like that's all I wanted.

So I get off the phone with Jeff. I call Jeremiah, who I now know is my boyfriend, but who I have no recollection of at all. Like, I don't know what he looks like. I don't know what our relationship is. I remember, like, nothing. Like, nothing that we've lived together. Like, have no conception of it. So I dial, and I'm still crying. And I tell him, like, can you come get me and take me to the emergency room?

He arrives and I immediately am just trying to hide my face from him because I don't know what to do. And we hug. And when we hug, my body does this thing where my head fits into this nook in his shoulder. And I have this body memory of doing that. The fact of that calms me completely. And I know that I trust this person.

We get to the emergency room. They run x-rays and they do a brain scan. The doctor's asking me, are you having trouble remembering anything? Is anything strange? And I was like, no, everything is completely normal.

The doctor is worried that my brain is swelling. So he's like, I'm going to send you home. He asks Jeremiah, like, are you her partner? And he says yes. And he's like, okay, like when you go to sleep, I need you to wake her up every hour and ask her questions. And if she doesn't know how to answer that, I need you to bring her back to the ER.

And then this doctor gives examples of what the questions are in front of me, which I am tracking and like holding on to and remembering like, okay, that's the year and that's the city. And one plus one is two. Got it. You know, I'm studying for this test that's going to happen tonight.

It is not triggering knowledge that I have, it's just information that I am hearing and then committing to memory the words that he's saying without understanding the meaning of what he's saying. So Jeremiah and I got back into the cab and at this point I don't know if we live together. I don't know where we're going, I just know that I'm going to where my house is.

I'm just looking out the window and having this complete other experience of being like, "This is what the world looks like." Nothing is familiar. When we stop, I don't know how to ask if this is his place or my place or if we live together. So I'm just sort of going with it and he says, "I'm gonna spend the night." And so then I know that this is my place. So I was just piecing information kind of like step by step.

Then he strips naked and he gets in bed. My heart is beating so quickly because I don't know this person, but I just take my clothes off and just get into bed like this is obviously like normal. I'm so tense, so scared, and he's just like, okay, like, let's go to sleep. The relief that just like washes over me is incredible.

Because I was afraid that, you know, I was going to have to have sex with this person that I didn't know. And that just felt like horrible. Like I did not want to do that. But also in order to protect the amnesia, I would have to do that. And I was so willing to do that. The next thing that I know, he's shaking me and he's like, what is one plus one? And I am like, two.

And then I'm just like drifting off to sleep again. He's shaking me and he's like, what is my name? And I'm like, I know that too. Jeremiah. And then where are you from? And this was not a question that anybody went over at the emergency room. So this is actually a question that I have no idea how to answer. I start to panic and I say, leave me alone. I just like I need to sleep.

And he's like, tell me where you're from. I was so scared that the feeling of being scared triggered the memory of I am from Colombia. So just through association, me feeling fear in my body was the neural pathway that led me to, oh, I am from Colombia. He goes to his work the next day. I'm left to my own devices, which is amazing. All I want to do is just stare at my brain.

It felt like a very creative space of not entirely knowing what things were, seeing it for the first time, and sort of coming up with language for what things were. There were like three cats in the apartment, who I also did not remember. It occurred to me that they wanted to be fed. And I was very unsteady and couldn't walk very well, so I remember just being on all fours going to the kitchen. No idea where anything is at all.

And I found the bag and I just poured it directly on the floor and just walked away. And then I was like, "Great, now I can go back to staring at my brain." You know that feeling that you have when you're in an airplane and you're looking out the window and there's this kind of beautiful landscape? That's sort of what it felt like to me and because I didn't have memory, I'm not thinking about anything.

My mind is not being drawn back to like, "Oh, this happened in my childhood," or "This is a moment of shame for me," or I'm just not thinking about anything or anyone. I'm not thinking about the future, I'm not thinking about what's happening, I am just in the moment and it feels like I am listening to my own blood, like some sort of internal song.

That was so magical. And I felt like this was the mystery of being alive. I felt like I was very lucky to be in a place where I had lost conception of identity and was stripped bare to this other thing that was just pure presence. And I felt so lucky to be there, like a very quiet and calm ecstasy.

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So I am like, okay, that's my mother. Without remembering who she is or what she sounds like or just anything, I answer the phone call and she starts to speak in Spanish. And I hear the Spanish and I understand that I know Spanish. And this is the first time this information is revealed.

My mother is saying, you have to stay away from this dress. Like, you need to promise me to just get rid of this black dress that you sent me a photo of. And when she says that, that is the one thing that does come back is the dress. That memory of what the dress looks like. But I don't know why my mother doesn't want me to come close to this dress. But when I recall the dress, I am like, I must get this dress.

She's continuously saying, distress is cursed. You need to not come close to distress. It doesn't even enter my mind that I would tell her that I've been in an accident or that I have amnesia. She's saying like, distress is going to trigger events that will make you into a widow. And I'm saying in my head, I wonder if having amnesia and kind of like losing myself is like becoming widowed.

And what I do say to her is, "I'm gonna keep the dress. Goodbye." So even though I don't have a memory of what our dynamic is, in that moment I am actually participating in what the dynamic is. What starts to happen over time is I slowly start to lose ground on this wonderful state of having amnesia. And anytime that I go to sleep, I seem to sort of wake up with more knowledge.

One of the first things that happened was I woke up and I just had this memory of being younger and being at a bar and like throwing my head back in laughter. And I remember like myself being there. I felt like I was grieving each time that a memory came. It wasn't like, oh, thank God, I know this now.

It was always like, I feel like I'm more flesh and blood now. And I am losing this eerie, beautiful state. And I didn't want any of the memories that were coming back. Anytime that I would remember something, I would just feel so anxious and have like anxiety attacks just remembering things. I had amnesia for about eight weeks.

Somewhere like near the end, I had this memory of my aunts and uncles telling me about seeing my grandfather move clouds. That was the first memory that I actually felt like, oh, I want to belong to that world. That is something that makes me want to come back as opposed to stay in this amnesia state forever.

Pretty soon after, I remembered, oh, my mother was a curandera too. And then I remembered, oh, she had amnesia as well. And then my mind just blew. Knowing that we each had separate accidents that resulted in amnesia, I was completely floored. Those two memories were like the floodgates opening up.

I just remembered people who came to see my mother and my mother telling stories of people coming to see my grandfather. And I remembered what it was like to be in Bogota. And just that's when it all just started to come and come and come. I started to return and starting to just want to return without telling my mother yet that I had amnesia. I called her on the phone and I said, tell me a story.

She started to tell me stories about her father, and so I started to really just gather memory in this way. The one thing that just completely made me fall in love with him, you know, as I was hearing this story and, you know, remembering it again in a way. My grandfather would travel to the Amazon or go up to the coast, and he would visit with other curanderos, or he would visit tribes.

And every time that he came back, he came back with an animal, which was her favorite part of him returning. One time he came back with a parrot that could curse. And he came back with a monkey. One time she said that he came back with an anaconda in a basket. And my mother was telling me that her and her siblings would sit on it like it was a piece of furniture and then play cards.

They would even forget that they were on top of the snake. And then the snake would start to move and they would slowly like glide. It was those memories and it was those stories that I just started to kind of like fall in love again with where I came from. Like I do belong to these people and I want to belong to these people. I had gone from the extreme of having no memory is the best experience that you can have as a human being.

to this moment of being on the phone with my mother, hearing her telling me stories, and feeling the complete opposite. Like, having the memories of your ancestors is the best experience that you can have as a human being. Prior to the accident, my relationship to these stories was that these were not stories that I could share with the world.

Because we as a family had encountered so much marginalization, you know, living in the city with the message that we would get was that we were superstitious and backward. And so I think those experiences then made me learn embarrassment and shame, even though that wasn't something that I had organically experienced.

I had learned that that part of my life was secret and that part of my life was something that I shared with my family, but not something that I shared with the world. But this time, when my mother was telling me these stories, I didn't remember this learned shame that had accrued in me throughout my lifetime.

That's what the accident and that's what amnesia gave me. It was just the joy and like the wonder and the I can't wait to tell people this story. This is amazing. That was the change in me.

I started to tell people. I just started to tell Jeremiah, who I had not told these stories at all, even though we had been dating. I feared that he was going to maybe say like, oh, that's incredibly superstitious and you're not an intelligent person. And then the relationship would be over. And I think that I was so afraid of that happening that I just did not go there.

And so by the time that this realization came to me and I remembered, oh, I used to be so embarrassed and I used to be so afraid of saying all of this, what had been sort of like a piece of my identity, it just no longer fit. As I started to remember the memories of the car bombs and the kidnappings and all the memories of fear that I have, those were moments where I was like, I do not want to be part of the world.

But by the time that these other memories came of my grandfather and my mother and, you know, just this wonderful, wondrous world, I understood at that moment, you can't have one without the other. You can't just pick and choose memories that are elevating and nurturing and memories that are not. I just had a different understanding of what makes a person a person.

And I think I stopped trying to get rid of those memories in a way. It was just these two things are true at the same time. And I was able to make peace with that. I was just becoming a different person. I think that I had been very guarded in my life prior to the accident. And after the accident, I felt very unguarded and very kind of sure of myself, very centered in a different way.

I think my writing was completely transformed by that. And I could start to know how to tell the story of my grandfather. I had been corrected years and years before when I had first tried to write that story. And I had abandoned it, feeling like maybe I'm wrong. Like maybe I don't know what's real and what's not real.

After the accident, I just felt so sure in my understanding of what my own culture was and so sure of the value of my own culture. And I just could write that story in a different way. And I could write about myself in a different way that had been completely closed off to me, I think, before that. In 2012, my aunts and my mom had a dream that my grandfather came to see them and said, I want my remains disinterred.

We had been underground for 30 years at that point. But because, you know, they all dreamt it in the same week independently of each other without telling each other what the dream was. Because that happened to three people, we decided that we needed to go back to Colombia and disinter my grandfather.

We found out when we arrived there that people had been leaving prayers in his grave, which is something that happens in Colombia when there's a curandero's grave. People go to the grave and give petitions and say, like, please take care of so-and-so or like, I would like a new job. And people just sort of write down these requests on little pieces of paper and then just stick it into the grass. Yeah.

He had been buried with requests. So they thought that that was why. I was thinking about memory a lot. And then when we were there and the grave had been dug and there was this mountain of dirt on the side, the grave diggers were like pulling out my grandfather's bones from the grave and they were, you know, setting them out on this tray. It felt like disinterring memory in some way.

And it felt like this is the second time that I am meeting my grandfather. This is the first time that I remember. He had been underground for all the same amount of years I had been above ground and alive. And there was something so strange to me about that and about that connection. And it was just a completely magical sort of outer space moment of being before my grandfather's bones and just being kind of like flooded with all of this memory.

After graduating college, I moved to California. I was writing my novel, the book about my family and my grandfather. And through the writing of the book, I was able to look at my family history and what it means to come from a curandero family and why those lives are kept secret so often.

I'm just like so thankful that I got to write the book because I think that I was able to do so much thinking around what memory means and what having a self means. In that time of amnesia, I really got like a look into how a person is made because I could see it happen. I could sort of see how memories would come and it would start to shape me as a person in one way or another.

In 2024, I did go back to the intersection where the accident happened. And you know that feeling when you go to your childhood house and you see your childhood house and you have that feeling of like, oh, this is where I'm from. I had that feeling with that intersection. And it's just a dirty Chicago intersection.

But I arrived there, I bought a donut and coffee and I just sat in a corner and was just like, wow, this is where I came from in a way. And it was so beautiful. And I think going back and having that experience is maybe the closest that I've come to feeling again, like the joy of what amnesia was. I still sometimes walk around and pretend that I have amnesia.

This is something that I just love to do for myself and just, you know, just suddenly walk around and pretend like I don't know what things are. It's the one way that I've found that I can inhabit something that comes close to the experience of amnesia without obviously being the full experience of it.

Prior to the accident, I had thought I wanted to be a person who didn't have the weight that I did have. You know, I just wanted to be unburdened. In a way, like going through amnesia, I had that experience of being unburdened. And coming out of it, I felt that memory is weight and that there is no differentiation between the painful memories and the joyful memories. It's all weight.

But there's something very beautiful about that weight. Like whatever has happened to you, it is the thing that makes you a person. It is the thing that has shaped you and marked you. I feel like there's a beauty in that as well.

Today's episode featured Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

If you'd like to learn more about Ingrid, you can find her on Instagram at I underscore R-O-J-A-S underscore C-O-N-T-R-E-R-A-S or on Twitter at Ingrid underscore R-O-J-A-S underscore C.

and on her website, IngridRojasContreras.com. Ingrid's memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. And her debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, was the silver medal winner in first fiction from the California Book Awards. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Ziziva.

among others. She lives in California. These books are available wherever books are sold. After we recorded the interview, I realized I forgot to ask Ingrid an important question. Did you go back to get the dress and do you still have it? I messaged her later and the answer was yes. She did pick up the dress and she still has it. You can see photos of Ingrid, her family, and the dress when we post them tomorrow on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.com

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free.

I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, Andrew Waits, and Sarah Marinelli, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.

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The missiles are coming.

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