Our Memories Are Creative Fiction
Memories are a curious thing. They’re like watching a selective short film on repeat, but each viewing reveals a different ending. Every time your mind conjures up a fragment of memory — good or bad — it adds a new perspective, as if revealing some hidden truth. It’s only when you revisit these memories that your emotions become stirred up.
Your mind signals an internal validation you never achieved. You should have said something but didn’t. You could have reacted differently, but instead you felt foolish. Without our ability to resurrect moments during times of loneliness, we would maintain a far more balanced emotional spectrum. Our anxieties would drop dramatically. But that’s not what biology intended.
Our ability to conjure specific moments from the past is how we understand time itself. Without this capacity, there would be no sense of temporal flow — no reference point to distinguish past from present. Without the interplay between past and present, we couldn’t envision possible futures. It’s through these memories that we comprehend time as a linear plane, with the past behind us and the future ahead.
Memories are every writer and poet’s favorite weapon. They travel back in time to recall their lover’s smile, the sound of her laughter, the timbre of her voice, then weave these details into poetry that some young admirer will later use to woo his own beloved. This beautiful cycle exists only through memory. Love grows fonder and stronger through remembrance — we treasure moments when someone showed us kindness, warmth, or love.
But our brains also love to play cruel tricks on us. When we remember ambiguous moments — What did my boss mean by that comment? What did she mean when she said she was looking for me? — all the follow-up questions our minds generate are products of this cruelty.
Our brain isn’t the storage unit most of us imagine. It’s designed for efficiency and survival, so instead of preserving exact events, it uses memory fragments, tints them with emotion, and produces creatively layered storytelling that feels believable. That’s why former lovers sometimes perceive slights where none were intended. Each time you revisit a memory, your brain adds small modifications and overwrites the original. Years later, that memory retains only a semblance of truth — tainted more by how you felt and how those feelings evolved than by actual events.
Next time you find yourself unable to forget a perceived slight, remind yourself: your brain is an adaptive, creative storyteller. Your memories are interpretive, not photographic.