The real me is a myth

We all want other people to understand us and appreciate us for who we really are. In striving to achieve such relationships, we typically assume that there is a “real me”. But how do we actually know who we are? It may seem simple, we are a product of our life experiences, which can be easily accessed through our memories of the past. Those memories shape a person’s identity. But it turns out that identity is often not a truthful representation of who we are anyway. Even if we are sure of your own memory, we don’t actually access and use all available memories when creating personal narratives. It is becoming increasingly clear that at any given moment we unwarily tend to choose and pick what to remember and when.

The false me is a myth

The false me are those memories that have to do with the truthfulness of the memories, which each time are chosen to become part of a personal narrative. Even when we correctly rely on our memories, they can be highly inaccurate or outright false. We often make up memories of events that never happened and remembering is not like playing a video from the past in your mind, it is a highly reconstructive process that depends on knowledge and data, a self-image to pass by with needs and goals. Memories are therefore very malleable, they can be distorted and changed easily, we know that suggestions of the past with imagination can create memories that are very detailed and emotional, while still completely false. Dichotomy manipulation of the memory is picking and choosing memories is actually the norm, guided by self-enhancing decisions that lead us to rewrite our past so it resembles what we feel and believe now. Inaccurate memories and narratives are necessary, resulting from the need to maintain a vivid momentum, up-to-date sense of self.