Your past is like a painting, one you remember starting, but not ever finishing.

I want to write about my life, not for the three people who visit my blog, but because I have to fill time, and in the hope that piecing it together will bring back lost memories. 

This last point is important to me because I often tire of the stories I tell myself and others about my adventures. They are all interesting, I believe, but I am also afraid that if I repeat them over and over, they will start living their own lives, one little exaggeration building upon another. I care if the stories I tell have some truth in them. 

But why would I doubt my own memories? I’m a sceptic, and as long as I can remember, I have always asked “why” if confronted with statements. Because many answers to why questions contradicted each other, I turned to other sources, and books are a great one. You cannot only read about other people’s ideas in other regions, but also from other times. If you read the literature, it is clear that we humans have a terrible memory. The problem with memories that primarily revolve around our own experiences is that we must be our own judge, and even if others were present and collaborated on our story, we still need to be cautious. One article I read, as an example, was about an experiment conducted by a young psychology student. He interviewed a group of people just after 9/11 and wrote down their experience, where they were, and what they felt. More than a decade later, he interviewed these people again and asked them where they were during that critical time. Several participants in this experiment insisted that their recollections were accurate, despite clearly conflicting with what actually happened in reality and with what they wrote down immediately after the event. They misremembered, but they were also sure they were right.