Life imitating art, imitating a facsimile of life.

I've always been fascinated by the twin themes of memory and identity. It's what my book is about, the idea that you are everyone you have ever met and everything you have ever done. Not massively original, I know. Some French chaps called Sartre and de Beauvoir among others got there ahead of me about forty years ago. It was a favourite part of my French degree course and I've never grown out of Existentialism, although I do still think it's quite an elitist philosophy, in that people who have the opportunity to experience a great deal will therefore have the opportunity to 'be' more.

Anyway, I digress. My twist on it is that I think you are everything you think happened to you. Our brains work in very complex ways and I have no faith at all in the reliability of memory. Recently, to explore this a bit, I've made contact with lots of people I used once to know in previous lives. Their memory of the small period of time in which our orbits crossed is invariably different to mine, and not just in small ways. A guy I went out with when I was twenty apologises to me for having treated me badly when for years I have felt badly about my treatment of him. Another friend remembers me as being a frail thing, when I remember a bolshy, spiky person inhabiting my body. One woman whom I have always described as a former best friend from my first year of secondary school before I was sent back to boarding school, although she tried hard to cover it up, quite clearly has no recollection of me at all from that time (yes, I did suss you, Jax!)

My friends have always laughed at my habit of 'unhappening' things, and maybe I unhappened a lot of things I don't want to recall. I wonder what else I hold in my head is objectively true and what has been warped in my mind to fit some kind of desirable reality. Or maybe everyone else is wrong... It's probably a bit of both, but none of us will ever know, will we?

"The past is no longer the past" said one friend (he who apparently used me ill) when he responded to me on Facebook, and he's quite right. Ten years ago before the internet and social networking sites I would be happy with my construct of the past, would never have questioned it. People in my life would have come and gone and though I'd have wondered about them (as I do) I'd never ever see them again, or have a potted update of their lives from across the pond, across the years. I've been so shaken by this whole discovery that I think I'm going to curtail my searches and lave the past where it should be. In my head.

But I'm still left with the quandary as to how I ended up being the person I am today. Although in a way the fact that we take a more active part in constructing our own pasts means that we're all more intense versions of ourselves than we thought, because we have taken our own experiences and distilled them through a process of filtering out or adapting what we don't want to recall to create a very personal version of ourselves.

Might have to rewrite the book a bit... I think I make this idea implicit and maybe it needs to be a bit more explicit. In previous attempts at books I thought I was hitting people over the head with an idea and they haven't got it.

The slightly weird postscript to this, which I won't explore here, is that things I write about keep happening to me. Can't help feeling it's all linked with the above...