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The oldest mistake we make about memory is believing it exists to preserve the past. It exists to preserve the living. Memory is not an archive; it is an ecosystem. Nothing survives within it simply because it once occurred. Things survive because they remain capable of living inside the environment of the present self.

Reality wastes almost everything. Every second contains more sensations than consciousness can inherit. Every conversation produces gestures that vanish forever. Every landscape disappears behind us almost as soon as it enters our field of vision. If memory truly preserved experience, the mind would collapse beneath the impossible weight of its own history. Instead, remembering begins with disappearance.

Nothing enters memory unchanged. Every experience arrives as possibility rather than permanence. Most never establish themselves; they dissolve before they have found a place to live. Others root themselves quietly, returning years later with surprising vitality. A very few alter the entire landscape around them, changing the conditions under which every future memory will survive long before we understand why they remain.

This is why memory resembles a forest more than a library. Libraries grow by accumulation. Forests grow by ruthless selection. A forest does not preserve every seed that falls upon its soil. It continually decides which forms of life may remain, which must decay, and which will nourish something that has not yet appeared. Every fallen tree becomes nutrients for another generation. Every extinction creates room for another arrival. Survival is never granted because something once existed; it belongs only to what continues finding a place within the changing ecology of the whole.

Memory obeys the same law. The past does not determine what is remembered; the present self does. The mind does not store experience faithfully. It metabolizes it. What cannot be integrated into the living system is broken down and returned to circulation. What can be integrated is transformed until it serves the ongoing life of the organism. Minds differ less by what happens to them than by what they can fully digest.

Trauma reveals the cruelty of this system. A wound that cannot be metabolized remains undigested, releasing toxins into every new moment. The mind does not forget the trauma; it fails to break it down. Healing is not the erasure of memory. It is the successful decomposition of what once threatened the entire forest.

Wisdom appears when this ecological intelligence matures. The wise do not possess more memories. They possess a more sophisticated internal environment. They have learned which experiences must be allowed to decay and which must be protected. They let go of yesterday’s victories without nostalgia and yesterday’s defeats without shame because both have already been converted into the substance of today. The rest of us carry half-digested failures that continue poisoning the present.

Eve Best as Rhaenys Targaryen in House of the Dragon s2 (x6)

secondly, i don't know that i've ever made this clear but i quite despise rhaenyra's character. and yes, i've read the books. i understand she's worse there. and what if i told you i don't care? her characterization in this show is fucking pathetic. why is she more sympathetic to the people that started this entire war than to her own allies? why is she not allowed to be vengeful? to be mad? to be cruel to the people that have taken so much from her? why does she somehow have more venom for the people trying to protect her and fight for her cause? why must every other character be stripped of everything that makes them who they are in order to make her look more magnanimous and sympathetic? when in the end, she justifies every reason as to why there is belief that she should not rule.

it's already bad enough that the effects of rhaenyra's mistakes are pawned off to other characters to sanitise her while the mechanics behind the most critical, pivotal moments of the plot have all been resigned to mishaps and misunderstandings of those other characters because now can anyone point to a single fucking person in this show and tell me, with conviction, what is their motive to do any of the things they do?

i'm supposed to believe alicent, who we've seen slash rhaenyra's arm for the injustice aemond suffers, who has told aegon "living or breathing, you are the challenge", who shields him with her own body when meleys emerges from the dragon pit, who answers "you idiot" to aegon questioning whether or not she loves him because it's so obvious and inevitable as the knowledge that the sun rises in the east—this is who i'm supposed to believe is selling out both sons to die by the hands of the woman she has spent decades detesting? she is suddenly so frightened and horrified at the reality of war only WEEKS IN that she forfeits her own children's lives? if anything, why does that not make her more intent on ensuring their survival?

alicent is nothing if not dutiful. she was once ambitious and righteous but #that man stripped her of that, set fire to her agency and cunning and then called it feminism and we all mourned. she may not be the most emotionally intelligent mother. she may not know how to show them she cares but she bleeds as they bleed. she cries for helaena because of what they've done to her girl. she sees aegon burned and broken and she asks if her son is going to die with so much fear and despair in her voice. why is rhaenyra the only mother on this show allowed to consider her children? allowed to fester in her own grief? although i have to admit that even then, they won't allow her to let that ebbing harden and be honed, as is of characteristic of grief, because the writers ,for some reason or the other, think angry, rageful women are impossible to sympathise with and this episode proved it.

helaena, most egregiously, is largely unaffected by jaehaerys' death. unlike her book counterpart, she does not desire to be queen nor she does not sink into such debilitating despair after b&c that she loses grasp of reality. but what then is left of her? and the answer is absolutely nothing. there is no grief, there is no urgency, there is no rage. there is quite literally nothing at all. the writers want me to believe this is innocence but frankly, i think it's cruelty. this just makes it seem like she had no regard for her son at all.

and in all of this, rhaena, baela and house velaryon are still who i grieve for most. i do not understand how any of them are still on rhaenyra's side and why the writers seem to hold their black characters in such contempt if not complete disregard. baela doesn't even really mourn jace and we're already setting her up with that loser ass baldie??? she brought jace back five minutes ago. why is she just #fine?

rhaena, by definition, was the only truly innocent targaryen in the dance. and it's not simply because she didn't have a dragon. book helaena took dreamfyre to the skies on her coronation day and wrote to rhaenyra asking her to swear fealty to aegon. she did not object to her half-sister's usurpation. but they're setting up rhaena of all people as the one who is to blame for jace's death (book rhaenyra ordered jace to fight in the gullet btw). they're using rhaena as a scapegoat for what was originally rhaenyra's orders and whitewashing helaena of her allegiance to rhaenyra's usurper at the cost of rhaena's innocence. i think this is the most upsetting thing to me because why can they not let a black female character exist as a beacon of feminity and gentleness as she was in the written material? even nettles, who was fierce and loud and brave, was not foolish or even morally grey. they've taken two beautiful and capable female characters, despite being nothing alike, merged them, and then turned the audience against her when neither of those characters were even remotely unlikeable to begin with!

they've also robbed rhaena of lady arryn's genuine care and consideration when contrary to the bullshit they put on my screen, even show lady arryn would have more reason to take rhaena in, after rhaenyra was incredibly disrespectful and did not uphold her side of the deal with the vale. rhaena is the king consort's daughter. who genuinely believes she's at any real risk of death?