The Truth

How do I know the past is not a fiction, conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present?

 

So I posted this on Facebook the other day and enjoyed the responses it brought forth. It was a link to a great photo set. A series of photos of the same woman starting with her all dolled up looking very arrogant to the final one of her having been attacked and homeless.  The statement being made clearly denotes those memories of ours that we have amended slightly so that how we see them today become bearable. Well that’s my interpretation. I certainly know that I have quite a few like that. I have so many memories that I can no longer recollect. Is that due to very poor memory or that I have a selective memory? I think with the illness and my past excesses it is a mixture of the two, there are of course many memories that I can’t wipe out, I can’t forget them no matter how hard I try but are all the details correct as they happened? Did those who witnessed them have the same memory as I? Also we perceive things through our eyes, through our ideals, our values. I believe three people will witness the same event with a different view, is there ever a correct version of events or do we just attach ourselves to the version that suits us most at that moment in time? The version that fits with our own story. Is it even possible for us to have any idea what the real facts of our life truly are? We know where we were born, most of us who our parents are, where we worked, the paper trail if you will, that we can’t deny, unless we change it in some way. But all the finer details, the intricacies, the moments in time that have made us who we are, I firmly believe we all have a fair amount of fiction in the story of our life. The one we see, the one we live with day in and day out. Not least because none of us truly knows oneself inside out, a lot of us search to know ourselves but we can never see ourselves as others see us. 

Therefore, we miss out on whole sides of ourselves that we are completely unaware of.  So once again we arrive back at the fiction we create, we have a whole vision of ourselves in our heads that only takes in our truths and not the truths that others see. We can on occasion through an honest partner or friend find out about our best and worst traits, how we then see that in relation to our fiction is possibly very different to how they see it. So do we also make up this fiction for those around us, our friends and family or do we see them in complete reality, is their history as we see them correct? We have all put someone or something on a pedestal only for the reality to come crashing down, so do we then see the reality or because we’ve been so dismayed or disappointed do we then make the reality much more negative then it really is? Just as we made the positive far more positive than it really was. How do we make sure that what we are looking at is the complete and true history? As rightly pointed out by one commentator we don’t. Is it really that important, life is so hard as it is then maybe a bit of poetic licence does us no harm, it helps us to get by in our day to day living. However, which one is worse; to have an overly negative view or an overly positive view of our past? Does an overly negative one protect us more from future disappointments, mistakes or hurt? Do the barriers that cynicism creates buffer us? Or the positive one means you can bounce back more quickly from encountered problems? The positive imaginings also acting as a protective barrier.