I think about how many versions of us exist only in other people’s memories. There’s a version of you that lives in someone you no longer speak to, frozen in time and unchanged. Then, there’s another version of someone who once misunderstood you. In their memory, you are sharper, colder, less kind than you remember being. And somewhere else, in someone who loved you, you are softer than you have ever allowed yourself to be. None of them are entirely true but none of them are entirely false either.
It’s strange, isn’t it? How we spend so much time trying to define ourselves, just to understand who we are becoming while fragments of us are scattered in places we can no longer reach or correct. Now this is where growth comes in. When growth comes, it doesn’t gather everyone who has ever known you to show them that you’re different now. The difference just happens, subtly and privately, until one day even you notice you no longer react the same way, or hold onto the same things, no longer recognize the person you once were in certain situations. Yet, to someone else, you are still that person, the very version they last knew and it’s humbling.
You don’t get to edit every memory of yourself, nor do you get to rewrite every misunderstanding. Some versions of you will remain incomplete and misremembered or entirely outgrown but that’s actually not something you can fix but it’s something to accept because the only version of you that truly continues to live and change is the one you carry forward.
