Jamais Vu

It’s very interesting to hear stories about yourself that you don’t remember, isn’t it? (It’s called jamais vu, apparently.) I was speaking to a friend a day or two ago about that concept, and it made me recall this story.

A few years ago, I visited my middle school to visit two music teachers who really inspired me to keep going with music, especially during a very lonely and rough time in my life. While speaking to them, one teacher recognized me and struck up a conversation. I didn’t recognize her, but her name struck a bell when she told me. Anyways, she told me this story that “she will never forget…

I was 13 years old, and it was the final day of the school year in my seventh grade, so it must have been June 2001. We were in a classroom that was going to be demolished in order for the school to start building a new school wing. According to this teacher, I asked her if I could write something on the wall, which she said yes to. ("Why not? It was being torn down,” she recalled.)

After the class ended, she went to see what I wrote. It said, “All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.”

I had absolutely no recollections of doing this, but I could see myself doing that; a troubled kid who found refuge in Pink Floyd's The Wall? Hardly surprising. And after recently listening to the record recently and being able to see Roger Waters perform it in concert almost ten years later, it brought me back to this story from all those years ago.