"Was It Really Like That?" — How Our Memories Play Tricks on Us

Have you ever think back on something—like a trip, a friendship, a work event, or just a random Tuesday—and realise the way you remember it doesn’t totally line up with reality?

It happens to me more often than I like to admit.

Lately, I’ve been reading about how our brains don’t actually store memories like a video recording. I used to think they did. I mean, I was convinced I remembered exactly what someone wore or the way a conversation went down. But turns out, our memories are more like stories we reconstruct every time we recall them. Which means they can shift. A loooooot...

In fact, psychologists call this the reconstructive nature of memory. Every time we remember something, we’re kind of piecing it together again, like assembling a puzzle from scratch again from the last time we recalled it. Sometimes pieces go missing. Sometimes new ones sneak in from different memories. It’s wild.

One classic example? The “misinformation effect.” Research by Elizabeth Loftus showed that even just hearing a slightly different version of an event can literally change what people “remember” about it. Like, if someone says, “The car smashed into the other one,” instead of “bumped,” people are more likely to recall broken glass, even if there wasn’t any. And just like that, one word changes the whole picture.

That blew my mind...

But lately, what’s really been messing with me is not just how memory gets distorted… It’s how much more distorted those faraway memories become. Like childhood, high school, our first jobs, romantic encounters, and the list goes on. Those hazy, long long-gone seasons of life. I’ll swear I remember a certain teacher being terrifying, only to find out from an old classmate they were actually super sweet. Or I’ll think I was always quiet and introverted, and then I see a home video where I’m chatting and singing songs in front of the whole family, completely unbothered.

There’s something called “memory consolidation,” where our brains simplify and generalise older memories over time. Basically, the further back something happens, the more our minds change the memories, sometimes in very misleading ways.

And here's something else: sometimes the memory gets skewed not because of how we remember it, but because of how we experienced it in the moment.

If we were anxious, angry, in love, insecure, exhausted—that emotional lens can distort reality as it’s happening. So then the memory gets built on a version of reality that was already a little skewed.

Like, I look back at some arguments I had in my early 20s and remember them as intense and dramatic, and they were, for me. But now I wonder: was I just overwhelmed? Was I projecting my own stress onto a situation that didn’t deserve that kind of heat? If your reality at the time is shaped by fear, or hope, or heartbreak… the version of the story you carry forward is going to reflect that.

And then there’s also identity shaping. Our memories are constantly filtered through who we are now. We reinterpret the past through today’s lens, which means we sometimes rewrite events to better align with our current beliefs or self-image.

I catch myself doing this at times, rethinking old experiences to fit my own narrative I tell myself now. Like, “Oh I always hated that job” or “That relationship never felt right,” even though in the moment, it was way more complicated.

It makes me wonder: what am I misremembering right now? What stories have I told myself so many times that I’ve forgotten the original version?

But I think there’s something oddly comforting in knowing all of us are working with memories that are at best, semi-true. It can give a little more grace to ourselves and to others. We’re all just trying to piece together meaning from a past that’s not always as clear as we think.

Anyway, that’s been bouncing around my brain lately, and I didn't quite understand it until today when an old primary school friend reached out to me and spoke of events that sounded like science fiction, as what he recalls from our childhood friendship couldn't be any further than it is from my experience.

If you’ve ever looked back at an old memory and realised, “Wait… maybe that’s not exactly how it happened,” you’re definitely not alone.

One big reason our brains do this is to protect us.

When something’s too painful or just too complicated, our memory might frame it in a way that’s easier to live with. This is part of what’s called emotional regulation—our minds helping us cope by reshaping the past into something we can carry more easily.

It’s also why nostalgia hits so hard. Our brains lean toward remembering the good, not because we’re delusional, but because it helps us move on..

There’s also this deep need we have to feel like we’ve been consistent people throughout our lives, even when we definitely haven’t, and our memories adapt to support the story we tell ourselves about who we are. This is where identity shaping comes in. Maybe we don’t remember every detail exactly right, but the version we hold onto helps us feel like we’ve been there, somewhat consistent and coherent. That we’ve grown. That all of our past made sense, somehow.

Even reframing painful experiences as “what made us stronger” has a psychological function. We look back and say, “That was hard, but I got through it,” and that helps us build resilience. That version of the story becomes empowering, even if the original truth was a lot messier in the moment.

So yeah, our memories are flawed. They're slippery and flexible and often totally unreliable. But that doesn’t make them useless; it makes them human, as imperfect as people who create them. They help us cope and grow. They help us understand who we are and how we got where we are, even if the small details are a little twisted.

I guess I’ve just been sitting with that lately—how much of what I remember is shaped by emotion, time, or who I’ve become since. It makes me a little more curious about the memories I cling to… and a little more forgiving toward the ones I’ve gotten wrong.

What’s a memory you thought you had figured out until time or someone else showed you a different version?

With Love