Retcon

Comic book fans will be familiar with the term 'retcon' in layman's terms means that the writer waves his hand and tells you 'Remember when we said this? We screwed up, forget about that.' 

 Retroactive Continuity: rewriting past events to be consistent with the new present.

My brain is doing this to me now and it's a very strange experience. Some of my memories are being amended to be consistent with the present. The memories stay almost completely the same, except one or two things are different. The other day something reminded me of walking around the neighborhood in high school. It was a vivid memory, as my random memories tend to be.

Two things were retconned, though. First, my CRPS has been written out of existence in that memory. Gone, entirely. Like it was never there. I see this as consistency with the fact that it's been in remission for a decade. It's no longer really a part of my life, so why would it be there in a memory that had nothing to do with it?

Second, I've been rewritten as a girl. Not a trans girl in transition or anything. I was a girl and always had been. This is incredibly detailed retconning, too. I "remember" what I was wearing; I "remember" my sense of what I looked like; I "remember" my stride, completely different from how I actually walked at the time.

So now I'm remembering my life as it wasn't, subconsciously replacing the actual me with an alternate me more consistent with my present self-image. It's almost like I don't actually remember me in any of those memories - I remember my interactions with the world around me, then insert myself into it.

I'm not completely sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I hate the failure of memory and the fundamental dishonesty of my brain. What I consider fantasy is replacing reality. But is it really? The only thing that seems changed is me - the rest of the memory seems intact. And is a change of "me" to maintain better coherence with the present me really so bad? Besides, it feels really good.

Regardless of the merits of the confabulation, my brain is being pretty clear about things:

Remember when you were a boy? That was a mistake, forget about that.