As your life continues, experience changes how you see your memory lane, and you find a new narrative to remember it. When you retell your life story, you reinvent yourself as you do.
This thought was presented in a YouTube video by Professor Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at NY University. She was quoted in a 2017 Scientific American article, “Why Do Our Memories Change?, by Senior Editor Mark Fischetti”. Professor Phelps said, “that our memories can change because each time we revisit them, they become vulnerable. When we first lay down a memory, it takes the brain a little while to solidly store the information—consolidation. And every time we subsequently recall that memory, it has to go through a new storage process—another slight delay for another consolidation.”
The book “Why Life Stories Change: As You Look At Your Own Life Story, You See Yourself Differently” states who we are is the total of the events in our life, especially those we connect with. Each time we tell our life stories, we choose the circumstances we connect with. We do just that by putting together the narrative of who we are in our own life stories.
As we retell the story, we can pick which of the events we connect with, what we conclude about them, and then weave and reweave the narrative about them into our story.
As my story changes with the retelling, it changes me. I become different because of how I see the story.
A person’s connections include those who have come into their lives, but even those events we experience through fiction and fantasy can contribute to our conclusions about life. For example, this idea is presented in a quote by George R.R. Martin: “a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,” and all those lives influence us.
A poem by an unknown author suggests it focuses on the influence of those people in our lives.
"Some people come into our lives for a reason, some for a season, and some for a lifetime.”