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Returning to writing after a long hiatus is a peculiar experience. It does not feel like starting over, but like meeting an old friend under new conditions. After three years without publishing in my Psychology Today column, I return today to “The Memory Factory” with the sense of reopening a space that was never abandoned—only quiet, like memories we do not revisit often but that continue to shape us.
Writing is a developmental practice. Beyond improving style or clarity, it exercises core psychological operations: attention, selection, organization, and meaning-making. To write is to work with memory, that is, transforming lived experience into narrative form. Regular writing sharpens this capacity. Yet, paradoxically, stepping away can deepen it.
A long pause acts as cognitive oxygenation. Freed from the demands of constant production, ideas loosen their rigid forms. Memory, far from being idle, continues to operate in the background: reorganizing experiences, reshaping meanings, forging unexpected connections. What once seemed settled may return transformed; what felt forgotten may reappear with new relevance. The pause does not stop thinking. It changes how thinking unfolds.
Psychologically, there is something profoundly creative about absence. Imagination needs empty spaces to operate. Continuous output can lead to repetition of concepts, arguments, and even metaphors. Distance introduces a productive estrangement: on returning, we encounter our own ideas as if they partly belonged to someone else. This distance allows memory and imagination to enter into dialogue, not to reproduce the past, but to reconfigure it.
Throughout “The Memory Factory,” I have treated memory as an active, constructive, and culturally situated process. Returning to this column only reinforces that view. My relationship with these themes has changed because I have changed. New personal, academic, and professional experiences now feed the symbolic raw material of this factory. This return is not about picking up where I left off, but about continuing a process that never stopped outside the page.
There is also an affective shift that comes with returning. Writing after a long pause tends to feel less anxious and more reflective. Urgency gives way to care. The act becomes less performative and more exploratory. This does not imply less rigor, quite the opposite. It means greater attentiveness: to ideas, accumulated readings, and questions that resist quick answers.
Coming back “to active mode” means recognizing that silence was productive, too. It was during the pause that certain questions matured and imagination regained breath. If memory is a factory, it does not run endlessly at industrial speed. At times, it must slow down, reorganize its machinery, and replace tools. This text marks the reopening of its doors, with the conviction that the pause was not a failure, but an essential part of the process.
