Everything You Believe About the Past Is a Story (Part 1)

What if everything you remember is a lie?

Not that the events didn’t happen. But that everything you believe about what happened, why it happened, what it meant, what it says about you or them, is just an interpretation.

Just a story.

The mind is a storyteller. And its stories aren’t objective records. They’re colored by emotion, identity, trauma, fear, hope. They’re shaped by the beliefs you picked up without knowing it. By the culture you live in. By what your parents modeled. By your wounds and your needs.

You think you’re remembering. But what you’re really doing is interpreting, again.

That painful memory you keep coming back to? It’s not the event that’s hurting you. It’s the way you’re framing it.

The way you say: They betrayed me. I failed. I should have known better. I shouldn’t have done that. That broke me.

All of it: Story.

What actually happened is long gone. What remains is a mental image. And that image is kept alive by thought.

By meaning-making. By interpretation. By identity.

You could say the exact same thing happened to two people, and they’d carry completely different stories about it. One feels empowered. One feels broken. Not because of the event—but because of the lens.

And you never chose your lens. It was installed by conditioning.

So how can you trust it?

The person you blame for how things went? They weren’t acting from some deep evil or from freedom of choice. They were acting from their conditioning. From their programming. Just like you were.

Nobody is the author of what they do. There’s no one behind the scenes deciding to hurt or betray or withdraw or disappoint. There’s just life. Just circumstances. Just patterns playing out.

The idea that it could have gone differently is one of the most painful illusions. It gives birth to guilt, shame, regret, resentment.

But what if that idea, too, is just a story?

Because what happened was the only thing that could have happened given the variables in place: their conditioning, your conditioning, the environment, the timing, the stress, the information available in that moment.

The story that it should have gone differently is not truth.

It’s a fantasy. A commentary. A thought-loop.

Let it fall away.

Not because what happened was okay. Not because it didn’t hurt.

But because holding onto a lie is what keeps the pain alive.

When the story falls, there’s just this.