It's touching how much humans rely upon their memories, but it's sad how memories betray us. I recently counseled my sister, who was feeling old & thinking she couldn't remember dumb shit from her past, that it didn't really matter, since she probably didn't remember them the way they actually happened anyway. It still seems a little strange for me to feel this way, since I used to worry in my youth about forgetting everything that happened to me, & kept a kind of diary for some time in early adulthood. (The diary is totally boring & useless now, by the way, since I often will refer to people that I honestly can't remember, & usually by their first names, which is maddeningly unhelpful.)
I don't worry about forgetting thing so much anymore. Everything I read about the human brain suggests that when we do remember, we remember a lot of our lives incorrectly. We remember, mostly, to protect ourselves. I recently became reacquainted with someone from my past & was honestly surprised that he had completely remade his past, when he had done some awful things, into a sort of sad tableau wherein people had hurt him for indiscriminate reasons. I don't think he was lying, I think he was utterly sincere. & he seemed downright puzzled that some folks from that time had any hostility toward him.
I flatter myself that I am somewhat self-aware, & so I imagine that I do the same things. In fact, I completely understand that it's not even a conscious choice, that our brains have evolved in such a way to try, at the very least, to make sure we're the heroes of our lives or, failing that, that we at least hold on to some modicum of sanity in a narrative that doesn't make fill us with complete self-loathing. How else could we live with some of the things we know we're capable of?
There are other ways our brain fucks with us of course, but the way our memory betrays us seems especially poignant to me.
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