si dawson

Mem­ory is noto­ri­ously unre­li­able.

It's a fair bet that most of the mem­o­ries we have are con­fused, jum­bled, or oth­er­wise incor­rect. Cer­tainly not accu­rate enough to hold up in court — this is, after all, why police­men write down every­thing at the scene of a crime.

The funny thing is, these are the mem­o­ries that we tor­ture our­selves with. Regret over things done or not done. Dis­ap­point­ment at other peo­ple & our­selves. Per­ceived fail­ures & missed opportunities.

Even when we're not actively beat­ing our­selves up, those mem­o­ries are still there in the back­ground, pro­vid­ing (unpleas­ant) flavour.

If our mem­o­ries are likely to be wrong (to some degree) any­way, why not at least make them pleas­antly wrong? Who's to say they have to be an accu­rate reflec­tion of the past? Surely what hap­pens in your head is 100% your business?

Of course, chang­ing your mem­ory of your phone num­ber isn't the clever­est thing in the world, but there are plenty of other juicy can­di­dates. How about

• all those sit­u­a­tions where you've been socially con­fi­dent, the life of the party
• the suc­cess­ful pre­sen­ta­tions you've given
• how pop­u­lar you were at school
• all those payraises
• the deeply lov­ing & sup­port­ive relationships
• the peace­ful breakups
• how effort­less it's been for you to meet new people
• those moments with your par­ents where you truly under­stood how much they loved you
• that long his­tory of high fig­ure sales
• the times you've stunned those around you with your bril­liance & insight

You get the idea! Make your (remem­bered) life as beau­ti­ful, poetic & mag­i­cal as you like!

pic by ali­ce­pop­korn

It's your brain — own it!

So how to do this? Well, it doesn't have to be any more com­pli­cated than find­ing a quiet spot, remem­ber­ing back to spe­cific life sit­u­a­tions you've had, and imag­in­ing them going however-you-want. Keep imag­in­ing them until the old mem­ory fades away & the new replaces it (this is very well researched phe­nom­ena). If you feel like part of you is strug­gling with this, you can always tap while you do it, but that's totally up to you.

Your life is noth­ing but the sum of your mem­o­ries. Why not start a new life, right now?

Just start with what­ever pops in your head. Recre­ate your mem­o­ries, mak­ing them as awe­some as you pos­si­bly can. As Orwell famously said "Who con­trols the past con­trols the future. Who con­trols the present con­trols the past." Well you con­trol the present.

As within, so without.

& here's a lit­tle anec­dote to whet your appetite. I had a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion with a cer­tain per­son a few years back, where per­haps they didn't give me the recog­ni­tion or appre­ci­a­tion I would have liked. In the few years since then, they've never really men­tioned this, let alone made any kind of big deal about it. Just not in their nature.

So hey, I did the above. Imag­ined them really under­stand­ing how much effort I'd put in to help them.. and show­ing me. I imag­ined myself feel­ing deeply appre­ci­ated. Loved. Thanked. It was awe­some! *laugh*

Didn't take long. The whole thing? Maybe 5 minutes.

The only dif­fer­ence I could out­wardly detect was that I felt more lov­ing towards them. That aside, I promptly for­got about it.

Next day, I'm surf­ing the web, & what do I find? A cou­ple of para­graphs in a very pub­lic loca­tion, from them, acknowl­edg­ing & stat­ing exactly what I'd imag­ined. Giv­ing me that thanks, that appre­ci­a­tion. Exactly how I (now) remem­ber it going.

Coin­ci­dence? Maybe. You decide.