Have you ever found something from the past that just makes you cringe? A journal, perhaps. You twinge with every misplaced comma, and hold your breath as you espouse some maddening logic from the past. You want it to end, but you just can’t stop reading. Brace yourself, and read on.

With the Personal Identity Narrative I recently wrote, and the next version in the works, I have been thinking a lot about the artificiality of our memories. Tonight I was trying to find a statistic from a study performed in conjunction with an apparently now defunct/repurposed online magazine named Oasis. Finding the website non-existent, I ran over to the Internet Archive and began to search through time for the rough date when the data was published.

About two seconds after I found the data, I had a daunting epiphany: In high school I published an article with this magazine.

3 minutes later I had tracked it down and was shaking my head at a five-dollar word I had misused (introspective).

Given that the Personal Identity Narrative project revolves around analysis of my past experiences, it is exciting to see an authentic slice without ten years worth of mental distortion. One of the major themes I am working with is driven by Joan Scott’s complaint about the blind acceptance of narratives. She argues that when these experiences stand on their, without considering any historical context, they normalize the environments in which the experiences take place. The presented context begins to stand monolithically without consideration for the relationships it has within the larger unrepresented context.

This severity of this obvious, but somehow frequently overlooked problem, is made stunningly apparent when my two stories about two almost adjacent points in my life are placed next to each other.

This story begs for a thoughtful read, but right now, all I can do is cringe.

Promise not to laugh? Take a peak yourself.