The People Who Remember Me Differently

There are people who remember versions of me I barely recognize.

And they may not be wrong.

That is an uncomfortable sentence for someone who has spent a considerable portion of his life telling his own story.

I know what I remember.

I know what things felt like from inside my own skin.

I know which moments I think changed me. Which wounds mattered. Which betrayals lasted. Which decisions I regret. Which stories I have told often enough that I know where the pauses belong.

But somewhere out there are people carrying completely different versions of the same years.

Childhood friends remember my family.

Family members remember my childhood.

Former parishioners remember the priest.

Colleagues remember the boss.

Friends remember the person I was before things fell apart.

Other people mostly remember the falling apart.

Somebody remembers me at my funniest.

Somebody else remembers me at my angriest.

Somebody remembers the time I showed up.

Somebody remembers the time I didn't.

All of them are remembering me.

That doesn't mean all memories are equally accurate.

Memory is unreliable.

People misremember. We protect ourselves. We fill gaps. We reinterpret old events using things we learned later.

Sometimes people lie.

Sometimes I have lied.

Memory's unreliability cannot become an alibi for dishonesty.

But conflicting memories do not automatically mean somebody is lying.

That is harder.

Because it means I do not own the definitive version of my own life.

I own an interior version.

That matters.

But it isn't the only one.

For years, I think I understood memory like a courtroom.

There were facts.

There were witnesses.

There were competing accounts.

Eventually, if everybody told enough of the truth, some final version of what happened should emerge.

I am less certain now.

Facts matter enormously.

But human beings do not remember facts alone.

We remember experiences.

And two people can stand in the same room and leave carrying completely different rooms with them.

The priest I remember being is not necessarily the priest every parishioner remembers.

I remember the sermons I worked hard on. The hospital visits. The funerals. The moments when someone trusted me with something fragile and I tried to honour it.

Someone else may remember volatility.

Arrogance.

Distance.

Poor judgment.

Maybe they only encountered me during the worst season of my life.

That was still me.

The existence of the better memories does not erase theirs.

Neither does their memory erase mine.

That is a difficult kind of accountability because it doesn't offer the simplicity of confession followed by resolution.

I can say, “That isn't how I remember it.”

And mean it.

Someone else can say, “That is exactly how I remember it.”

And mean that too.

Then what?

For a long time, my instinct would have been to establish the record.

Find the emails.

Check the dates.

Locate the document.

Explain the context.

Correct the exaggeration.

Separate what happened from what somebody says happened.

There are times when that matters.

Especially when serious allegations are involved.

Truth is not infinitely flexible.

But not every disagreement about a life can be solved with exhibits.

Sometimes the question isn't:

Who has the correct version?

Sometimes the harder question is:

What did it feel like to know me then?

I don't always like the answers.

There are people who experienced me as generous.

There are people who experienced me as exhausting.

Both may be right.

People who thought I was brave.

People who thought I was reckless.

Both may be right.

People who saw confidence.

People who saw ego.

People who saw a wounded man trying desperately to survive.

People who saw a man whose wounds were making him dangerous to be around.

Both may be right.

There are versions of myself I still want to defend.

Others I would rather bury.

And some I have probably romanticized because they help the present version of me make sense.

That is the strange thing about memory.

We don't only remember the past.

We keep editing our relationship to it.

A childhood moment that seemed ordinary at twelve becomes devastating at forty.

A person we once blamed becomes more understandable.

Someone we once excused becomes less so.

Something we called love begins to look like dependency.

Something we called failure begins to look like escape.

The event does not change.

The person remembering it does.

Which means even my own memories disagree with each other.

The twenty-five-year-old me had one explanation.

The thirty-five-year-old had another.

The forty-five-year-old is less certain than either of them.

I think that may be progress.

Not because truth becomes unknowable.

But because certainty about ourselves can be one of the easiest forms of self-deception.

I have written a lot about labels.

Victim.

Offender.

Priest.

Addict.

Father.

Failure.

Survivor.

The problem with labels is not always that they are false.

Sometimes they are terrifying because they are true.

The mistake is believing that because one true thing has been named, everything else becomes irrelevant.

Memory can do the same thing.

Someone may remember me primarily through the worst thing I did.

Someone else remembers the best thing I did and cannot reconcile it with what came later.

I have done both to myself.

Neither is enough.

A human life is too large to fit inside the memory of one witness.

Including the person who lived it.

Perhaps maturity is not finding the final version.

Perhaps it is learning to tolerate the existence of versions I cannot control.

To listen when somebody remembers me differently.

To correct what is false.

To own what is true.

To accept that some people may never understand me the way I understand myself.

And to recognize that understanding myself does not automatically mean I understand what it was like to encounter me.

There are people who remember versions of me I barely recognize.

Some of those memories would probably hurt to hear.

Some would embarrass me.

Some might make me angry.

Some might remind me of good things I have forgotten.

I no longer think my job is to reconcile every account into one version I can live with.

I think my job is harder than that.

Listen.

Tell the truth.

Take responsibility for what is mine.

Resist accepting what isn't.

And leave enough room for another person to say:

That isn't the David I remember.

Because maybe they are not wrong.

Maybe neither am I.

Maybe a life this long was always going to require more than one witness.