The Mind
The Mind That Remembers Everything
I have always had a complete photographic mind and I remember everything.
I remember my hospital stays. I remember what led me there. I remember the Nazarene church in Concord and the pastor’s wife who screamed at me. I remember the roach-infested apartment with the money orders. I remember Herrick Hospital in 2009 and the way the light hit the wall when I knew my life was changing. I remember Dr. Ziba Rahimzadeh telling me she was fabricating my illness to get benefits. I remember Donna teaching me to drive at night. I remember Pam in Keizer with the Baha’i prayer book on Christmas.
I remember it all. Every face. Every word. Every betrayal.
That is the curse of a photographic mind inside mental illness. You don’t get to forget. You don’t get to blur the edges. The trauma is in HD.
I have been missing for years. Not physically — but spiritually, mentally, emotionally gone. That is how mental health robs your life and steals everything from you. It steals time. It steals memory by giving you too much of it. It steals relationships because people in treatment are not your people forever. It steals your name and gives you a diagnosis instead.
It took coming to Salem to feel whole again.
Not the church. Not the county. Not the board and care home. Salem. A new city. A new apartment I’m moving into this August. Court cases yesterday that I handled myself. Credit I’m rebuilding. A non-profit I’m birthing for women.
Healing is possible when you completely surrender to God and know who you are praying to — not the false God that so many people in church pray to.
The false God is the one they told me about in Concord. The one who hates Obama. The one who lives in the Vineyard where I saw cattiness and two-faced people. The false God is the one who needs you broken to keep you in the pew. The false God is the one who lets case managers lie on paperwork and calls it help.
But the God I surrender to is the Creator so big no one can even imagine. The God who was in Macy’s at Sunvalley Mall when I got sick and a plane crashed hours later. The God who was in Dr. Stambaugh’s office when I rearranged his books. The God who was in Pam’s kitchen last Christmas. The God who was in the holding cell in Roseburg when I got baptized for the 10th time.
I pray many times a day now. Not to religion. To Him. And I know who I’m talking to.
My photographic mind is no longer a prison. It’s a testimony. I remember everything because I survived everything.
Mental health took years from me. God gave me Salem to give them back.
I am not my diagnosis. I am not my hospital bracelet. I am not what Dr. Rahimzadeh wrote down to get a check.
I am a woman who remembers. And I remember that I am free.
Cathryn M. Murray
From Ashes | Remembering It All | Surrendered, Not Lost
Salem, Oregon | August 4, 2026
