MemoryLand

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There's a world of difference between 'perceived memory' and 'actual memory'.
Two worlds in fact.

It begins, as does all science and religion, with doubt.

I held many of my memories to be basically 'true'. Of course I was perfectly prepared to believe that on a particular day the sun didn't shine as brightly as I remembered, that my little sailor suit was red instead of blue, and that I probably didn't fly to NeverLand, but basically all the rest would be truthfully stored in my brain.

And then I discovered the 'truth'.

I wasn't remembering things in the same way as my Mother or Brother. Not tiny little variances but huge chunks of radical differences.

So I started to gather 'facts', believing that I could find out that way who was 'right'. I couldn't have been less wrong.
Truth, as memory, actual or perceived is so subjective that it renders itself useless in retrospect. All memories are coloured, mostly by emotions, to suit ourselves.

We are storymakers and in our world of memories we need to make the stories work.
In MemoryLand the bad guys must always stay bad, the good guys must always sit on their white chargers, and there is a moral to every story.
Grey zones are the scary places in MemoryLand. Gray zones are sticky areas of doubt and possibilities for alternative answers.
We can never be truly happy without a 'Happy Ending', or at least a story that has a beginning, middle and end.

The fundamental problem arises at preciesely the point where we decide to accept all of this as 'fact', 'truth', 'memory'.

The passage of rite to adulthood is one that forces us to accept that we cannot trust all adults to speak the truth.
Then, as young adults we are forced to accept that we cannot trust ourselves (our brains) to speak the truth.
A double sword.

Trusting memories as truth is impossible. Trusting emotions as relevant and/or proportionate is just as impossible, and dangerous too. Our whole emotional vocabulary is built during the first 4 years of our lives, but we know that our memories from that time are not necessarily 'true'. The implication is of course that our whole adult emotional vocabulary is based upon these early 'lies'.
Emotions are notorious deceivers. One day you wake up and there is no coffee and you feel like there is an international plot to destroy the world, the next day there is no coffee so you go to the store to buy some more.
The facts aren't changed, the only variable is your emotions, subjective emotions at that. Emotions are dependant on what? A thousand little things.

Memory? Truth? Emotion?

Just like men, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
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