Do not think of your own past as quite real. You dress it up. You gild it or blacken it. Censor it. Tinker with it. You fictionalize it and put it away on a shelf: your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.
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When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception.
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What’s stored in that memory isn’t the actual events, but how those events made sense to us and fit into our experience.
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Our memories are filled with gaps and distortions, because by its very nature memory is selective.
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To fill in the holes, we turn our memories into specific images, which our minds understand as representing a specific experience, object, or thought.
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Our past experiences have been dismantled, analyzed, re-collated, and then made ready for imagistic recall.
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The images we store in our memories are not exact replicas of what we experienced; they’re what our minds turn them into. They are what we need to re-create the story.
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It’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.
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Did this happen? Yes. Did this happen in this way? The answer to that, if you’re a grown-up, is “Not necessarily.”
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When memories are involved, you have to admit that there’s no single truth.
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End of conversation
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