<center>![49834020_1951141228514241_6155871042175762432_n.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRwpujxdBEQX3RNBsjaN1M2ofe5NRmPDCDs1MPbbKfW1q/49834020_1951141228514241_6155871042175762432_n.jpg)</center>

I was thinking the other day about the stories we tell. And the ones we don't. It's something that fascinates me, the way things are remembered in time because in a way, that's more interesting than the memory itself, to see how it goes down in history, how the story one tells changes over time. 
For example, there was a bit in the book I'm reading (about a girl trying to piece together the life of her dead mother) where she finds a children's book with a dedication of 'with love from Mum' and she thinks oh, my mother must've written this for me when I was small. A reassurance of her absent mother's love. Only to discover a bit later in the book that the book actually belonged to someone else entirely, to find that her father had stolen it. And yet, that's not the story she tells herself. Sure, she doesn't know the truth, but often enough, we do know how things went down and choose to tell it "wrong" anyway. 
Seems fascinating to me and that detail in the story really struck a chord with me for some reason. I thought about the things that seem so important now, the memories that good or bad seem to shape who you are and who I am now.
And I wondered.

*How will I tell this story fifty years from now?* 

It would be an interesting experiment, to record these stories somewhere and then read them in 50 years, see how the narrative has changed, both in how I tell it to others and how I tell it to myself. Because most of the time, the things that seem huge at one moment or another in life turn out to be insignificant. The love story that seems to define you now, the mistake you can't get over, the opportunity you're not taking because it scares the shit out of you...they'll all pass. In 50 years, they'll just be memories. Long gone and largely unimportant. Really, if you look at your grandparents or parents, who are now quite old and you hear them tell a story from when they were young, what do you think?
Most likely that urgh, you've heard this 30 times already and it doesn't even matter now. The world has moved on. And honestly, so have they. They recount their old stories, but they don't find them nearly as important now. And yet once they did.
Can you imagine? That once your grandparents and great-grandparents were young people daunted by some seemingly huge event that they thought they'd never get over. But they did.

And you will, too. Chances are that the things that seem hugely important now won't really matter in fifty years' time.  I was thinking of how I might tell a story in 50 years and I realized I don't know. I can only know how I'm telling it now and I make the mistaken assumption that I will see it that way forever. 

But as they say, time puts things in perspective. And you overcome anything. Things that seemed to break your heart at some point, moments you never thought you'd recover from. And you don't, you don't recover the person you used to be. But you become someone new and just because you're new doesn't make you worse than who you were before. You have to change, but that change will be almost forgotten in half a century. 50 years, an insignificant amount of time, if we look at the big picture. That's what your troubles are, fractions of a fleeting moment.

<center>
## Thank you for reading,
![photojoiner_photo(16).jpeg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYbuu6L9G2cTzP5LTJF2yUkuH7fVmNZhhxRQQCXnN5Q1X/photojoiner_photo(16).jpeg)
</center>